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Ask HN: What are good solo developer blogs that you enjoy reading?

by lucasfdacunha on 2/8/2020, 2:02:52 AM with 145 comments
Hey guys, I like to read blog bosts about developers that run some kind of project (rentable or not) and usually are pretty open about its development and how things are going.

However, it's really hard to find some of those, unless you found those somewhere. Hacker Newsletter today had a pretty good article https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-2/

I'm mostly looking for something similar since this kind of blog post can give some good insights.

Thanks.

  • by enriquto on 2/8/2020, 2:51:56 PM

    I follow regularly these people, these are mostly slow-going blogs or websites:

    1. Fabrice Bellard: https://bellard.org/ This is not really a blog, but a traditional website with links to the work of its author (who is probably one of the top programmers ever). It updates rarely, but when it does, it is to expose yet another monumental piece of computing work that will blow your universe.

    2. Linus Akesson: https://www.linusakesson.net/ He's always onto some funny crazy things: obfuscated programming, underhanded programming, c64 emulation, chiptunes...

    3. Uriel l'Étranger: http://cat-v.org/ The only self-described "philosopher of software" that I have ever seen. His website is of course not updated anymore, but you can re-read it many times and always learn something new.

    4. Ted Unangst: https://flak.tedunangst.com/ Nice to follow some cool news about openbsd development

    5. Andy Chu: http://www.oilshell.org/blog/ Who has embarked in an amazing quest to turn the unix shell into a cleaner tool

    6. Jens Gustedt: https://gustedt.wordpress.com/ If you really want to be up to date about the evolution of the C language

  • by avinassh on 2/8/2020, 1:09:43 PM

    I love the blog posts of Julia Evans - https://jvns.ca/

    they are quite informative and very enjoyable to read.

  • by shaklee3 on 2/8/2020, 5:18:39 AM

    For low-level software, these are great:

    https://eli.thegreenplace.net/

    https://travisdowns.github.io/

    https://preshing.com/

  • by gengstrand on 2/8/2020, 6:48:41 AM

    Whenever I evaluate a technology stack for microservice architecture viability, I implement the same feature identical polyglot persistent microservice then run it through the same load test as all the others. In that way, I can compare and contrast these various technology stacks. I blog about the results here.

    http://glennengstrand.info

    So far, I have covered clojure on ring, scala on finatra, java on dropwizard, javascript on node, python on flask, scala on scalatra, java on spring boot, go, and typescript on apollo (graphql).

  • by SyneRyder on 2/8/2020, 4:01:23 AM

    Cliffski's blog is one of the only ones I follow that is still active. Not every post is on development progress, but enough that I find it worth following:

    http://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/

    A couple of recent posts I liked:

    https://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2019/12/16/stability-p...

    https://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2020/01/14/trying-to-a...

  • by new_here on 2/8/2020, 3:36:00 AM

    Here’s a curated list of engineering blogs, anchored to the individual category: https://github.com/kilimchoi/engineering-blogs/blob/master/R...

    Might be some names you recognise or want to explore.

    I also wrote a basic script to rank domains by HN upvotes if you want to distill the list a bit more: https://github.com/RhettTrickett/hacker-news-rank

  • by Pmop on 2/8/2020, 5:01:27 AM

    I used to read Joel's Joel on Software a lot. Also, Graham's . Another hidden jewel is the Elias Daler's blog.

    Edit: I have to add Steve Corona's blog to the list. He's more on the motivation and guidance side. Everyone gonna hear and read stories about people getting straight out of their college with a six-figure job, working for SV startups. But the truth is, you're more likely to struggle, a lot, specially if you live outside of the developed world. Instead of success, Steve's story is of one who dropped out of the college at 19 and had to sleep in his car for while.

  • by koenigdavidmj on 2/8/2020, 4:53:18 AM

    Joey Hess: http://joeyh.name/

    Lives out in the sticks and codes embedded stuff in Haskell, usually to automate his life in the backwoods of East Tennessee.

  • by sixhobbits on 2/8/2020, 10:11:01 AM

    I had a similar question the other day. I asked a few people and no one seemed to have a good collection to point to.

    I specifically like reading posts by people who post regular retrospectives (weekly, monthly, or yearly).

    So I started [0]. It only has three entries right now (including the one you mention above), but I would love to see contributions via pull requests.

    [0] https://github.com/sixhobbits/technical-writing/blob/master/...

  • by DyslexicAtheist on 2/8/2020, 10:45:20 AM

    I really love Jesse Frazelle's[1] blog. She posts things about low-level (firmware/open-hardware/system) security. Her work is already well known here on HN[2].

    A few more of my fav:

    The grugq (NatSec, Tradecraft, OpSec): https://gru.gq/

    Pinboard (aka Maciej Cegłowski): https://idlewords.com/

    Adam Aelkus: https://aelkus.github.io/

    Bert Hubert: https://berthub.eu/

    ____

    [1] https://blog.jessfraz.com/

    [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=jessfraz.com

  • by ashnehete on 2/8/2020, 8:30:58 AM

    http://rachelbythebay.com/w/

  • by gmcquistin on 2/8/2020, 3:36:55 AM

    https://overreacted.io - Dan Abramov's blog

  • by young_unixer on 2/8/2020, 3:01:04 AM

    https://drewdevault.com

  • by rounakdatta on 2/8/2020, 4:22:19 AM

    One of the sweetest Distributed Systems blogs I have ever read: http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

    And yes, also my favorite 101 explainer blog: https://arjunsreedharan.org

  • by kamaal on 2/8/2020, 5:38:33 AM

    Not exactly a blog but as fresher I used to read https://www.perlmonks.org/

    PerlMonks. The Original StackOverflow.

    I still at times discover cool programming ways. Its a treasure mine.

  • by kmatthewc on 2/8/2020, 4:24:53 AM

    https://vorpus.org/blog

    I was particularly influenced by this post.

    https://vorpus.org/blog/notes-on-structured-concurrency-or-g...

  • by huhtenberg on 2/8/2020, 10:50:19 AM

    http://www.tinytouchtales.com covers both the process and the results, including the $ numbers. Great games too :)

    https://bvckup2.com/wip covers mostly technical parts, but gives a good view into what's involved in making a software product from A to Z, especially in the parts further down the page.

  • by fulldecent2 on 2/8/2020, 2:55:35 PM

    Here is my list of solo developer blogs. Usually they are on topic. This does not include personal blogs I follow that happen to be developers.

    @mdo (Bootstrop) - http://markdotto.com/

    Keith Cirkel - https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/

    Coding – Corbin's Treehouse - https://www.corbinstreehouse.com/blog

    Aaditya Purani – Ethical Hacker - https://aadityapurani.com/

    Ben Balter - http://ben.balter.com/

    fulldecent - https://privacylog.blogspot.com

    Orange - http://blog.orange.tw/

    Cocoa with Love - http://www.cocoawithlove.com/

    Mark Otto - http://markdotto.com/

    Moxie Marlinspike's Blog - http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/

    hueniverse - http://hueniverse.com/

  • by simonw on 2/8/2020, 4:47:24 AM

    I started posting weeknotes a few months ago and it's really helped me get back into the habit of posting at least once a week: https://simonwillison.net/

    Weeknotes archive here: https://simonwillison.net/tags/weeknotes/

  • by cpach on 2/8/2020, 6:58:23 AM

    Brent Simmons has a good blog where he writes about the development about the RSS reader Netnewswire

    https://inessential.com/

    (Netnewswire itself is not a solo project though)

  • by Mojah on 2/8/2020, 5:36:09 AM

    If you’re into Laravel and PHP, Freek is very open about all his code: https://freek.dev

    I also blog about code and the financial side of running your own business: https://ma.ttias.be

  • by visualphoenix on 2/8/2020, 3:44:40 AM

    Nicholas Frechette[0] has a deeply technical blog about building his MIT licensed animation compression library for game development...

    [0] https://nfrechette.github.io/

  • by ivanech on 2/8/2020, 6:40:25 AM

    This is a true solo developer:

    http://pketh.org/archives/

    It looks like this thread is turning into general blog recommendations. I like these, and they haven't been listed:

    https://macwright.org/

    https://tonsky.me/

    https://nadiaeghbal.com/posts/

  • by kccqzy on 2/8/2020, 7:12:46 AM

    Small Cult Following, for Rust core language development: http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/ It's far from a solo project but he presents unique insights into the language. I personally really enjoyed his discussion of associated type constructors and high-kinded types, a series back in 2016(!), back when I started toying with Rust and somewhat frustrated by the lack of HKT.

  • by dhardenb on 2/8/2020, 3:09:28 AM

    I started a blog last year with the intent of sharing my journey to build an online game as a solo developer.

    My activity dropped off but I’ve recently committed to push forward again so plan to get back to blogged several times a week.

    I’m working on a post right now to talk about my experience of having my game reach #2 here at HN at what that was like. Should have it out tomorrow.

    Anyway, you might find it interesting: https://blog.spacefrigates.com

  • by akoutmos on 2/8/2020, 2:38:12 PM

    https://akoutmos.com/

    I started a blog the middle of last year and have written mostly about topics related to Elixir. But have also covered topics like RabbitMQ, Prometheus, Grafana, and PostGIS. I find my own blog very useful as I often reference the associated GitHub tutorial projects to remind myself how I did something :D.

    Next week's post is about using Loki for structured logging!

  • by lhnz on 2/8/2020, 4:01:37 AM

    https://wordsandbuttons.online

  • by epicgiga on 2/8/2020, 9:41:49 AM

    Awesome comment feed.

    Specific to CSS, Chris Coyier's stuff is good https://css-tricks.com/author/chriscoyier/

    Fairly sure he's solo enough and blogger enough to count.

  • by joshwcomeau on 2/8/2020, 4:45:20 AM

    Shameless self-plug: I blog about React, interaction/animation, and remote work. It's a bit of a pot pourri, but people seem to like it!

    https://www.joshwcomeau.com/

  • by app4soft on 2/8/2020, 6:30:07 PM

    1. Alex Pakhunov: https://blog.not-a-kernel-guy.com/

    Alex Pakhunov (aka 'Not a kernel guy') is Sr. Software Engineer, Flight Software at SpaceX.

    He born and graduated in Ukraine, but now is U.S. citizen.[0,1]

    [0] https://twitter.com/alexeypa/status/958886120825081856

    [1] https://blog.not-a-kernel-guy.com/about/

  • by bullen on 2/8/2020, 2:59:51 PM

    I'm trying to get a forum about MMO development started by posting to my own blog from here: http://reddit.com/r/mmodev

  • by sillycube on 2/8/2020, 3:09:50 PM

    Solo developers are too busy with the business. I once started a series called "from 0 to 0.1: the journey from 0 to 1,000 customers. But I was too busy with other works like dev or marketing towards my target customers.

    https://blog.seo-product-optimizer.com/index.php/2017/01/11/...

  • by codevscolor on 2/21/2020, 2:34:16 AM

    1. http://www.oilshell.org/blog/ 2. http://fragmentedpodcast.com/ 3. https://blog.stylingandroid.com/

    I have more than 30 blogs on feedly.

    btw, I blog on https://www.codevscolor.com

  • by thallavajhula on 2/9/2020, 1:44:50 AM

    Here are some of the blogs I follow:

    https://tjcx.me/ https://blog.vjeux.com/ https://zachholman.com/ https://rsms.me/

  • by winrid on 2/8/2020, 9:56:56 AM

    Oh good, more things to add to my rss reader :)

    The Dolphin blog is good. https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/ It might have what you're looking for. Not single dev though, but very personal.

    John Carmack on Twitter is good as well.

    Here's my own: https://blog.winricklabs.com

  • by narrowtux on 2/8/2020, 12:48:14 PM

    Very good articles about Elixir and Erlang

    https://www.theerlangelist.com/

  • by chandureddyvari on 2/8/2020, 6:17:39 AM

    I personally enjoy https://jalammar.github.io/ and https://mlexplained.com/- For machine learning & deep learning stuff

  • by darekkay on 2/11/2020, 9:56:29 PM

    I've been building a Dashboard web app for almost one year now and I'm blogging [1] about it from the first day.

    [1] https://dashboard.darekkay.com/docs/blog/

  • by 666lumberjack on 2/8/2020, 10:47:32 AM

    http://danluu.com is excellent.

  • by edem on 2/8/2020, 6:33:12 PM

    I think what you are looking for is Indie Hackers: https://www.indiehackers.com/ They have a plethora of interviews with one-man projects you can learn from.

  • by yakshaving_jgt on 2/8/2020, 6:53:47 AM

    Here’s a good one: https://stevelosh.com/

    And here’s mine: https://jezenthomas.com/

  • by _bxg1 on 2/8/2020, 4:05:00 AM

    John Carmack tweets pretty regularly, often about projects. Right now he's taking a solo swing at AGI

    https://mobile.twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack

  • by ponana on 2/8/2020, 2:02:22 PM

    https://kyletruong.com

    I recently quit my job to become a solo dev and just started blogging about the process. If my content is of any value, please consider visiting.

  • by ChrisMarshallNY on 2/8/2020, 3:32:19 AM

    I write about Swift and various development topics.

    I’m getting ready to start a new series about Core Bluetooth.

    https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany

  • by fendy3002 on 2/8/2020, 2:47:02 PM

    Not solo but factorio: https://factorio.com/blog/ team has blog which is maintained every friday and very insightful

  • by skiril on 2/8/2020, 2:53:35 PM

    https://www.starterstory.com/ Its like Indie Hackers was back then. Before it changed ownership and became boring....

  • by lucasfdacunha on 2/8/2020, 5:13:56 AM

    A good friend of mine is a very talented frontend engineer and has a very cool blog/website.

    https://rafaelcamargo.com/stories

  • by ndri on 2/8/2020, 10:15:23 AM

    https://rubenerd.com/ is a dude from Australia who posts about BSD, anime and various tech-related stuff.

  • by eternalny1 on 2/8/2020, 2:56:14 PM

    Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing:

    https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

  • by Arnie0426 on 2/8/2020, 5:48:45 PM

    I love reading these two for Python/Recommender Systems: 1. Ben Frederickson: https://www.benfrederickson.com/blog/ 2. Erik Bernhardsson: https://erikbern.com/

    And for pure ML: 1. Ferenc Huszár: https://www.inference.vc/ 2. John Langford: https://hunch.net (although he hasn't written a technical post in a while)

  • by hopia on 2/8/2020, 1:54:47 PM

    As for developers building projects, you might like: https://www.derrickreimer.com/

  • by kndjckt on 2/8/2020, 6:04:39 AM

    I love Matthew Rocklin’s (the maintainer of Dask) blog https://matthewrocklin.com/

  • by victorleungtw on 2/8/2020, 2:29:47 PM

    I blog about my learning journey here if you're interested: https://victorleungtw.com

  • by klden007 on 2/8/2020, 10:28:46 AM

    AWS Lambda lead Articles about distributed systems and more

    http://brooker.co.za/blog/

  • by EvanKRob on 2/8/2020, 1:59:43 PM

    Nothing fancy but the content is really good. https://talktechnical.net/

  • by wesleybatista on 2/8/2020, 2:54:09 PM

    https://www.indiehackers.com/

    The founder also runs a podcast.

  • by avindroth on 2/8/2020, 6:52:47 AM

    Designer/gamedev/makes interesting tools

    https://xxiivv.com/

  • by boobo94 on 2/9/2020, 10:49:34 AM

    Hi,

    I'm Boobo and I have a dev blog: https://boobo94.xyz

    Hope you subscribe there.

    Thanks

  • by rammy1234 on 2/8/2020, 4:46:41 AM

    https://www.staticfire.site

  • by dinkblam on 2/8/2020, 3:41:59 PM

    if you are into obj-c/swift, there is a list of the most useful blogs here: https://apple-developer.org/resources/online-resources.html#...

  • by EliRivers on 2/8/2020, 12:21:18 PM

    Steve Yegge's old rants are good. I can never tell for sure which parts are him trolling me.

  • by vzhou842 on 2/8/2020, 10:10:58 AM

    shameless self plug: https://victorzhou.com has a mix of machine learning, web development, and other topics. You may have seen some posts from there on HN in the past

  • by buboard on 2/10/2020, 12:58:27 PM

    the twitter of the maker of nomadlist , levels.io . He doesn't seem to have time to write blog posts, but he 's actively against the VC and publishes his company's financials 100% in the open

    He gives real advice rather than wannabe advice

  • by dorumus on 2/8/2020, 2:37:02 PM

    rusu.io tracks the challenges, lessons and successes in the development of a solo developer.

    It won't overflow you with content that you cannot keep up with, but you'll get good insights into how a stoic approach to life and development works

  • by ryeguy_24 on 2/8/2020, 9:37:33 AM

    https://tyler.io

  • by wikunia on 2/8/2020, 9:08:28 AM

    If I'm allowed to self promote my own blog: https://opensourc.es Currently building a constraint solver from scratch and in a few days there will be a post about how to build an Enigma and how to crack it

  • by rahuldottech on 2/8/2020, 8:30:27 AM

    Not always strictly dev related, but nice:

    https://codinghorror.com

    https://shkspr.mobi

  • by rcamargo on 2/8/2020, 6:36:24 PM

    Very nice post! A lot of awesome references here.

  • by firemelt on 2/8/2020, 4:54:59 PM

    This thread os great

    Google really kill personal site like these

  • by wafflez180 on 2/8/2020, 4:13:59 PM

    Declan Hopkins: https://dooskington.com/

    His latest Antorum game blogs have been real interesting

  • by jacobobryant on 2/8/2020, 3:32:52 AM

    Here's mine: https://jacobobryant.com/

    Can't vouch for if it's any good though ;)

  • by SlyShy on 2/8/2020, 3:00:54 AM

    Indiehackers.com has tons of these. Enjoy!

  • by brianpgordon on 2/8/2020, 6:09:19 AM

    Looks like nobody has mentioned https://daringfireball.net/ yet.

  • by travmatt on 2/8/2020, 6:47:52 AM

    For reverse engineering, Rolf rolles.

  • by irockzz on 2/9/2020, 5:03:14 PM

    Personally i follow codeburst.io

  • by unixhero on 2/8/2020, 2:36:01 PM

    Hacker News!

  • by person_of_color on 2/8/2020, 6:36:10 AM

    Dan LeMire

    John Regehr

  • by yori on 2/8/2020, 7:21:48 AM

    Here's a good one: https://susam.in/

    Stumbled on this when his domain was hijacked accidentally due to an anti-botnet operation and his post about it came on HN (check the "Sinkholed" post). Since then I've subscribed to his blog, read the older posts and enjoyed the newer posts too.

    He mostly posts about technology and mathematics. The reason why I got hooked to this blog is that they are mostly about offbeat topics that I wouldn't normally come across on my own. So there is something new to learn from every post. And they are very well written with great attention to detail.

  • by bra-ket on 2/8/2020, 7:30:12 AM

    https://lemire.me/blog/

  • by spawarotti on 2/8/2020, 6:36:44 AM

    www.yegor256.com

  • by bdg on 2/8/2020, 10:08:54 AM

    I am working towards a side-project but it's not live yet. I hope to launch it in the summer. I plan to document the process and release some posts about it "kalzumeus style" once I start it. My main blog right now is https://statagroup.com/