Top Software Engineering Blogs on Hacker News

Given the rising popularity of people and companies writing about software engineering, I was curious to find out which blogs might be the most interesting to read. A bit of Googling led me to this list of awesome engineering blogs. With 299 contributors it seemed like a well-vetted place to start. However, as I began scrolling through the list of 600+ alphabetically sorted blogs it became apparent that, in fact, I actually had no idea where to start. Some of the blogs on this list haven't posted anything for years. So I wrote a simple Python script to check this list of domains against the Hacker News Search API and count the total amount of points that each domain has accrued over time to provide a dimension of social vetting. The results from this method turned out to be quite interesting so I've put together a post to share them.

Results

Here is the list of those top 25 software engineering blogs ordered by most points (in brackets) accrued on Hacker News for all time:

Full list (.csv)





Okay, that's a more helpful way to sort things. But how do we know if some of these are still current? Let's take a look at blogs with the top scores for 2017 to give us a more recent indication of appreciation with a full year of data.





Top Blogs of 2017

Full list (.csv)





A bit of a re-ordering and a few names have been filtered out. Perhaps it might also be interesting to know what articles caused most of the interest in these blogs during this time? Let's take a look.





Top Posts of 2017

Full list (.csv)





So some of the major topics of last year were Google's proof of the first SHA1 collision, plenty of React license drama, some Firefox controversy, but ultimately Dan Luu's steady approach helped him to pip Google for the top spot for 2017.



Okay, but that list is so last year, what's happening this year? Well, if you're the type of person who likes to live life on the edge and make assumptions about the top engineering blogs for 2018 so far, then read on.





Top Blogs of 2018, so far

Full list (.csv)





Some familiar names, a few more individuals amongst the upper ranks and Netflix has joined the party. Let's take a look at some of the highest scoring articles from these.





Top Posts of 2018, so far

Full list (.csv)





Okay, so a few non-software engineering anomalies in here. Stripe's position appears strongly influenced by their (usually awesome) product announcements and their decision to end support for Bitcoin. Otherwise, it appears there is still plenty of interest in Rust. But we're only just about 6 months through the year so we'll have to see what the rest of the year has in store.



Obviously, these results aren't perfect. There are most certainly many worthwhile blogs that haven't been included in the list (perhaps you'd like to add them) or haven't been upvoted sufficiently on HN. Perhaps there might be better communities or services that can be used to measure something like this. Regardless, I hope you found this somewhat insightful. If you'd like to play around with the source code you can find that here.

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