My 10 Favorite Software Engineering Blogs

At this point, there’s hardly any bigger tech company that does not have an engineering blog. In my opinion there are a few characteristics of a good engineering blog:

The content is written by people like software engineers or data scientists

The blog posts are not just glorified product marketing

In this post I want to share blogs I follow to stay up to date regarding software engineering. Of course, there are way more interesting blogs out there.

Instagram

Instagram is a widely used platform. Hence, it faces a lot of tough engineering challenges (e.g. regarding scalability, data protection). The following is one post about making the web version of Instagram faster by reducing the amount of JavaScript and optimize the execution.
Making instagram.com faster: Code size and execution optimizations (Part 4)

BBC

BBC is not only a broadcasting company but they also employ a capable engineering team. Accessibility is a topic that is often neglected in software products. Hence, I am glad to know how accessibility helped to improve their internal design system.
Shifting left: how introducing accessibility earlier helps the BBC’s design system

LeanIX

Disclaimer: naturally, I’m biased about this one. Nevertheless, I want to include LeanIX as the blog is fairly new but the topics range from learnings to open-source work. Here’s a great post which answers a popular question: why software has bugs.
Why software has bugs - explained with kids | LeanIX Engineering

Netflix

Netflix has done a lot of pioneering work in the software engineering world. If you have never heard of GraphQL then I can recommend to take a look at this post. Many companies like Netflix are now creating new APIs entirely with GraphQL instead of REST.
Beyond REST

GitHub

GitHub hardly needs any introduction: at this point, most software engineers should have used GitHub at least once. Web Components is a new standard to write and reuse components regardless of any JavaScript framework. Check out this post to learn more about how GitHub uses Web Components.
How we use Web Components at GitHub | The GitHub Blog

Wix

Wix is a popular website builder to create websites with no code. Their engineering team shares content about microservices, the technical interview process and more. As someone who likes to create something new I can recommend this post for some motivation.
Let’s Not Ditch Another Side Project

Google Developer Experts

You may have heard about the GDE program. There is a lot of knowledge shared as there are various topics covered related to Google technologies. I like this post about best practices regarding pull requests.
How to Pull Request.

PayPal

PayPal is a widely used service to pay people or businesses in an easy way. If you’ve ever been interested into the idea of the JAMstack then this is a good entry into the topic.
What exactly is JAMstack?

Airbnb

Airbnb should be known to most of you. As a fan of TypeScript I like their work on ts-migrate which Airbnb has developed to migrate large code bases from JavaScript to TypeScript.
ts-migrate: A Tool for Migrating to TypeScript at Scale

Capital One

Working in a finance company does not mean to only work with legacy systems. The engineers at Capital One are regularly sharing their lessons learned in areas like machine learning, cloud infrastructure and web performance. I like this post about ways to avoid coupling in microservices design as many companies are struggling with following the microservices mindset.
How to Avoid Coupling in Microservices Design

Conclusion

Thanks for reading this post about my favorite tech blogs. Which engineering blogs are you following? Let me know in the comments.