5 Reasons to Follow French Engineering Blogs

With more than 40 active blogs, there is something for everyone.

If you ask any software engineer in France: which engineering blogs do you read? They’ll probably tell you the ones from Google, Netflix or Airbnb. And for a good reason, I also read them!

But I’ve been working in France for 4 years now and I can assure you there’s tremendous value here. I have gathered the best 40 engineering blogs in France written by their tech teams, that you can now follow in one place.

A selection of 40 engineering blogs from French companies in guriosity.com

If you are working in IT and want to boost your career or business, here are 5 reasons to follow these engineering blogs and a selection of articles.

1. Learn popular and new technologies

With more than 40 active blogs and 600 articles last year, there is something for everyone. You can find a selection of content around popular technologies like Doctlolib’s article about replacing RxJS with React hooks.

From general programming languages to more niche ones like Haskell, Elixir, Kotlin and Go, they got you covered. For example, Leboncoin shares their journey deploying more than 100 services in goland on a daily basis.

If you happen to be more interested in data, Hugging Face publishes AI articles regularly and contributes to open source on their mission to solve NLP, one commit at a time.

2. Get insights about the future of work

You will find companies sharing their experience with remote work like Slite, a tool to share all your company knowledge. Recently, they shared 5 remote principles that all companies can use to solve their organizational challenges.

It has become common for French startups to open offices abroad, such as Kapten opening a tech hub in Barcelona to attract world-class tech talent. It can also help retain the local talent by giving them an opportunity to relocate. Young professionals want to travel and developers are no exception.

French companies already contribute to open source, giving the opportunity to developers from different companies to collaborate. I don’t believe that by keeping engineers within the building we will reduce turnover, but the opposite can be true. Alan’s CTO wrote about the talent freedom pledge.

3. Follow the expansion of French companies in Europe and beyond

Out of the 40 startups announced as the Next40 in 2019, 19 of them have an engineering blog. The annual list honors France’s highest performing tech champions and grants them access to unprecedented support and funds.

Within the list of engineering blogs, you will also find other startups that are expanding abroad. Qonto’s CTO wrote how they shipped their neobank for SMEs and freelancers to Germany, Spain, and Italy in less than two months.

4. Find compelling content in English and French

There is a shortage of software engineers in France. Growing teams that compete in international markets are now closing the salary gap with the US for senior jobs. It’s a good time to check what is happening in France.

We used to hear about French engineers moving to Silicon Valley, but the reverse is also happening. You can read why this engineer moved from San Francisco to Paris to work for Alan, a growing digital health insurance.

Surprisingly or not, most of the blogs are written in English and published on Medium. If you prefer reading in French, check the blogs by Younited Credit and Deepki. The most active contributors in French are IT consultancies Xebia, Octo, Ippon, and LinkValue.

5. Get to know engineering teams

One of the most important criteria for young graduates to join a company is the learning possibilities. Teads and Deezer share on their blogs the stories of junior engineers joining the team.

Senior software engineers are continuously contacted by companies and head hunters. If you want to make a more informed decision, engineering teams share their best practices through their blogs. For example, iAdvize shares how they use feature flags to test features on production before they are ready for release.