Discover the best developer blogs on any tech stack(bloggingfordevs.com)
bloggingfordevs.com
Discover the best developer blogs on any tech stack
https://bloggingfordevs.com/trends/
51 comments
I 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.
thanks 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!
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!
It 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.
that 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.
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.
Get some experts in the area to rank your existing content and suggest weightings for their recommended sources. This is the less from launch after launch of really great sites that aggregate information.
Let's take Stack Overflow as an example. Jeff found a small group of experts and expanded it. They seeded both questions and answers. They didn't bring on just one or two experts though, they brought on enough to ensure a good distribution (not perfect) of viewpoints and then reviewed before expansion. They kept repeating this and didn't optimize for just one kind of developer (Django over Java.) All segments of developers tended to need the same features, but it would show up with one segment first. Getting answers on some topics wasn't possible until the product was more mature. Kill crap ruthlessly like SO did with downvoting and moderator-led deletion.
If you are building an ML model then you are going to need to find a range of experts and either seed from what they are sharing, or create a review system. You can reward people with kudos on a contribution page, donations to open source projects or charities (even on behalf of a group of them), or find another way to motivate them. It just needs some hustle, but you've got to forget about purity, be open about how your model works, and iterate.
Let's take Stack Overflow as an example. Jeff found a small group of experts and expanded it. They seeded both questions and answers. They didn't bring on just one or two experts though, they brought on enough to ensure a good distribution (not perfect) of viewpoints and then reviewed before expansion. They kept repeating this and didn't optimize for just one kind of developer (Django over Java.) All segments of developers tended to need the same features, but it would show up with one segment first. Getting answers on some topics wasn't possible until the product was more mature. Kill crap ruthlessly like SO did with downvoting and moderator-led deletion.
If you are building an ML model then you are going to need to find a range of experts and either seed from what they are sharing, or create a review system. You can reward people with kudos on a contribution page, donations to open source projects or charities (even on behalf of a group of them), or find another way to motivate them. It just needs some hustle, but you've got to forget about purity, be open about how your model works, and iterate.
Perhaps 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.
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.
That'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!
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!
Why 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.
He's not asking them to be penalized, just to let people choose what their speed is. I get the same problem on mastodon: there are users there whose posts I really appreciate and find interesting but I had to unsubscribe from because their posting frequency flooded out everything else. I just check up on their feed separately every once in awhile instead
I'm not asking for some strict formula, more some ability for people to describe what kinds of blogs they're after in more detail in a way that's flexible, but not overly fiddly to use.
I'd possibly put a shared blog under a similar category as the ones with weekly roundups. Which is exactly why I threw out that example - I don't want hard-and-fast Google-style rules, because I would expect that to work out about as well as hard-and-fast Google-style rules ever does.
I'd possibly put a shared blog under a similar category as the ones with weekly roundups. Which is exactly why I threw out that example - I don't want hard-and-fast Google-style rules, because I would expect that to work out about as well as hard-and-fast Google-style rules ever does.
Is there plans for I18N for the content buckets?
I'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."
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."
Machine 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.
He definitely has a far more commercial focus than many other bloggers but this seems a bit too critical to me.
I 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.
Statistics on the complexity of replies?
Exactly. And SEO optimized garbage is already what we get currently.
Love 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.
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.
OP 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!
Let'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 *
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 *
Haha 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!
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!
This 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.
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.
I 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.
(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.
I remember the days of Joel Spolsky, Elliot Rusty Harold, Bruce Eckel, et al. Who are today's luminaries?
I 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.
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/
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.
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/
I 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.
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.
OP 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 ;)
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 ;)
Anything that takes traffic away from Google is a good thing.
Bring back the old school internet, forums, curated lists, niche communities, irc !
Bring back the old school internet, forums, curated lists, niche communities, irc !
These 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.
I would be happy to use human curated collections of links by topics.
OP 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?
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?
I was wondering if you can offer RSS feed for the stuff that ends up on the front page.
Nice. 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.
OP 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 :)
I 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
I couldn't figure out how to switch from all topics to something else on mobile
I 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.
Can 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.
Experts have to do more virtual conferences and meetings, for example, to increase benefit
Really, you need twitter to submit suggestions of topics?
Where is the Delphi?
Please add for us!
Thanks
Thanks
no new submissions in last 10 days.
thanks for point this out! just accepted a bunch of pending submissions :)