Discover the best developer blogs on any tech stack
304 points by mlent 4 years ago | 50 comments- ad404b8a372f2b9 4 years agoI like the concept but the curation would have to be done ruthlessly by experts, otherwise you'll get the same SEO optimized garbage we find on google. To see Machine Learning Mastery at the top doesn't inspire confidence in your curation process. It's a blog that's emblematic to me of low quality content pumped out for SEO purposes.
- mlent 4 years agothanks for your feedback (OP here). yeah it's tough, i try to give anyone a chance to rank who has more than just a few posts.
what I didn't expect about that site is that it gets shared A LOT on twitter. still trying to refine the algorithm :)
thanks a ton for checking it out and sharing your feedback!
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4 years agoIt occurs to me you could switch the curation and trend gathering steps to minimize the amount of work on your end. Instead of going "twitter trend -> filter out the bad ones with in-house experts" you could go "follow experts -> find out what trends among them". That's my usual workflow when using twitter.
- mlent 4 years agothat is already what i'm doing pretty much. i accept blog submissions and try to look for signs of quality, and then monitor for mentions of their sites.
as you suggested though, i didn't know the ML space enough to know that Machine Learning Mastery publishes daily and has an army of people who like and retweet ANYTHING they publish.
so it makes me wonder if i need to have some kind of dampening effect or how i can adapt the algorithm to handle that.
- mlent 4 years ago
- mumblemumble 4 years agoPerhaps there could be a ranking that takes posting frequency into account, and lets people decide whether they want to see higher- or lower-volume blogs.
Perhaps not a straight ascending or descending by frequency. For me, the sweet spot seems to be no more than once a month. More if it's one that does something like a weekly post aggregating interesting articles from other blogs.
- mlent 4 years agoThat's a cool idea! Adding an "advanced search" is something I've been thinking about.
Gives people more control over their personal "algorithm" and what they value most when reading personal blogs.
Hadn't thought about frequency but that could definitely be something you could automate based on RSS. Thanks for the idea!
- pc86 4 years agoWhy would you penalize a blog with 3 authors who publish 3x the articles of a personal blog? Why would you penalize higher volume at all? Trying to ascribe anything close to quality based on volume is like trying to grade developer productivity and/or skill by LOC.
- mlent 4 years ago
- mycall 4 years agoIs there plans for I18N for the content buckets?
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4 years ago
- pc86 4 years agoI've purchased whatever Jason calls the big bundle from ML Mastery and the books are pretty much the same. I get the impression the primary goal was "produce a lot of pages," while "impart information" was secondary.
That being said, it looks like points are awarded two ways:
* Counts the least: Retweets and likes of a tweet containing a link to an article on the blog
* Counts the most: Replies and mentions of an article on the blog by other people
So I'm sure it's possible to game this, and it seems to bias toward incumbents (but what doesn't), but at least it's trying to be a little better than "here's a list of blogs I like."
- sixhobbits 4 years agoMachine Learning Mastery has working code samples. That already puts it in the top 1% from my perspective and I definitely relied heavily on Jason's blog posts while doing my NLP masters.
He definitely has a far more commercial focus than many other bloggers but this seems a bit too critical to me.
- pc86 4 years agoI mean I spent hundreds of my own money on the bundle so it's not like I think he's a hack or fraud or anything of the sort. But there's a decent amount of duplicated content.
- pc86 4 years ago
- kevas 4 years agoStatistics on the complexity of replies?
- sixhobbits 4 years ago
- stiray 4 years agoExactly. And SEO optimized garbage is already what we get currently.
- mlent 4 years ago
- ChanningAllen 4 years agoLove the concept.
One slight improvement that would push me to actually bookmark a site like this is if, rather than merely listing _entire blogs_, it listed a feed of the most recent _posts_ from the various blogs.
Posts are the level of abstraction that directly aligns with our reading habits. (Similar story for podcasts: give me an episode feed, not a podcast feed.) Twitter and other social media giants have cracked this code well.
- mlent 4 years agoOP here! Great point. Right now each blog just shows the #1 trending post, but it could definitely also pull recent articles by RSS feed. Thanks Channing!
- mlent 4 years ago
- pentagrama 4 years agoLet's appreciate that this project try to give visibility to personal self-hosted blogs (not mediums, linkedins, substacks, dev.tos) and is using (I guess) good old RSS tech to get the articles.
Cheers! * opens google.com/reader and plays the 2005 Gorillaz hit song Feel Good Inc before going to the cinema to see V for Vendetta *
- mlent 4 years agoHaha thanks! (OP here) I'm using a combination of the Twitter API, RSS, and Puppeteer to put the data together. RSS is nice but not always complete, and some blogs don't have it :)
Glad you enjoy it, and yes, the goal is to make it easier to find blogs from individuals. I don't reject sites hosted on 3rd party platforms, but I do encourage people to post their own domain name when possible.
Cheers!
- mlent 4 years ago
- pimterry 4 years agoThis is great! If you're looking for other similar sites, I'd also suggest taking a look at https://engineeringblogs.xyz/ too.
While the BFD trends site is focused on personal developer blogs & trending posts, that one includes high-quality engineering team blogs too, like Cloudflare and Google Research. It's a bit simpler, and focuses simply on the latest posts rather than trending content, but it's worth a look.
- tnorthcutt 4 years agoI love this! Sometimes it's hard to find articles by individuals about dev topics, especially more niche topics, because it's hard for them to rise above Stack Overflow, Medium, etc. in search results. But I find that individual/independent blogs are often far higher quality and do a better job explaining concepts.
- mlent 4 years ago(OP) thanks for checking it out! it was definitely cool (but also surprisingly hard) to discover so many independent blogs by making this project. i'm glad you like it.
- mlent 4 years ago
- mariodiana 4 years agoI remember the days of Joel Spolsky, Elliot Rusty Harold, Bruce Eckel, et al. Who are today's luminaries?
- m_st 4 years agoI remember Joel too. Especially also the forums where you could get in contact with (among others) industry leaders.
One of today's (tech) luminaries? For me it's Scott Hanselman. Always worth reading, even if you're not particularly on the Microsoft stack.
- m_st 4 years ago
- nilsandrey 4 years agoI liked the idea, but I'm expecting the home page to be more like "https://bloggingfordevs.com/trends/" with a link or banner link or something to the stuff it's at home today; at least having the links to trends at first instead of need to moving to the bottom to see them. I'm afraid some colleagues didn't found out and just kept on the first page.
You directly go to dark mode ;) it's more popular I known; I like to suggest a light mode; maybe you can read it from the system like StackOverflow.
- mlent 4 years agoOP here, thanks for the suggestion!
Yeah it's kinda meant to be like its own mini site. But if you click the logo at the top, it does take you to the root homepage :)
Adding a light mode is on the backlog, thanks for the suggestion! I need to remove a few hard-coded CSS values first ;)
- mlent 4 years ago
- wyck 4 years agoAnything that takes traffic away from Google is a good thing.
Bring back the old school internet, forums, curated lists, niche communities, irc !
- playing_colours 4 years agoThese days, my experience to use Google search for finding good sources for some high level technical question is very bad in general that can be summarised as going through piles of corporate blog posts with shallow content promoting their products.
I would be happy to use human curated collections of links by topics.
- mlent 4 years agoOP here, I know what you mean.
I found it similarly irritating while sourcing the data that all the top 10 google results recycled the same, outdated recommendations.
Do you mean you'd like a central place to discover individual's curated list of blogs they read? Like blogrolls?
- mlent 4 years ago
- penguin_booze 4 years agoI was wondering if you can offer RSS feed for the stuff that ends up on the front page.
- nirajkrsingh 4 years agoThank you so much for sharing this useful and informative information with us.
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- nirajkrsingh 4 years agoThank you so much for sharing this useful and informative information with us.
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- asebold 4 years agoNice. I've been so burnt out seeing the same type of content for certain topics I follow. This looks like a promising tool for finding fresh new info.
- mlent 4 years agoOP here, I'm glad you liked it! I definitely discovered a lot of interesting people blogging while sourcing the data. Hope you find something cool inside :)
- mlent 4 years ago
- icameron 4 years agoI inherited some old Rails code and am updating sites recently. It turns out whoever wrote the code I'm working on was using blog-driven development. Getting a kick out of finding many old blog posts where the code originated from. Google->Ctrl+C->Ctrl-V->Repeat
- rptr 4 years agoCan you please create a separate section for System programming(C, C++, Operating systems, compilers...). I would like to submit few blog entries from my collection.
- njdullea 4 years agoI couldn't figure out how to switch from all topics to something else on mobile
- 99_00 4 years agoI've found immediately useful information and look forward to digging deeper into the content. Thank you so much for this. Your site is exactly what's been missing for me for so long.
- mlent 4 years agoi'm glad you've found it useful! makes me super happy to hear :)
- mlent 4 years ago
- terribledustin 4 years agoI love the idea of adding some way to have crowd bias and not all mlent alone curating. Not that I think you’ll be corrupt, but more that popular opinion is _often_ good.
- ziadallaghi 4 years agoExperts have to do more virtual conferences and meetings, for example, to increase benefit
- nojito 4 years agoThis affiliate spam in the programming community is getting ridiculous.
- mlent 4 years agohey! OP here. are you talking about my site? I don't have a single affiliate link on my website.
not sure about the sites linked, but i reject sites that are low quality and filled with aggressive ads!
- mlent 4 years ago
- thepra 4 years agoReally, you need twitter to submit suggestions of topics?
- DLA 4 years agoStraight up awesome work. Love this! Thank you.
- mlent 4 years agoOP here, appreciate the feedback! Hope you find something cool while browsing.
- mlent 4 years ago
- chovybizzass 4 years agono new submissions in last 10 days.
- mlent 4 years agothanks for point this out! just accepted a bunch of pending submissions :)
- mlent 4 years ago
- rboaro 4 years agoWhere is the Delphi? Please add for us!
Thanks
- lailalessdad 4 years ago