Newsletters and aggregators

I'm long past the moment where I used to subscribe to every newsletter on the web. These days I'm trying to narrow down my sources of knowledge only to the top quality ones. I hope this list will be useful for you! 😊

Top tier - best quality

• The Pragmatic Engineer - it exists in both free and paid version, and I can highly recommend the latter. At this point of time, I think it may be the highest quality newsletter for IT professionals on the web. What's important is that Gergely Orosz is a creator of the unique content, not merly aggregator of interesting links.
• Level Up - awesome, free aggregator of the best, recent news in IT created by Pat Kua. I highly agree with him im terms of what bits of articles are high quality ones, so I end up reading most of what he recommends. It's mostly directed towards IT leadership crew, on a Technical Leader level.
• Software Lead Weekly - a similar, aggregcontent to what Level Up brings, many times same articles repeat. However, I often find links from Oren Ellenbogen even more useful for Engineering Managers, especially due to Peopleware section.
• LeadDev - this one is not an aggregator, but creator of the very high quality, unique content on the web. It covers famous people from the industry, like mentioned Pat Kua, but also James Stanier, Camille Fournier and others. They cover many topics but it's directed especially towards Technical Leaders and Engineering Managers. In some cases CTO's will find useful information here.
• The Engineering Manager - blog created by James Stanier, who shares one of the most hands-on advices for Engineering Managers. His websites has a huge base of very high quality articles.
• Irrational Exuberance - newsletter of famous Will Larson, magnificent resources for executives, CTO's, directors who lead technical organisations.

Good - worth considering

• Tech Lead digest - a similar content to Level Up, and for the same audience. If you'll subscribe to both, majority of links will overlap. The advangate of this one is hte fact that it is shorter.
• Programming digest - puerly technical newsletter, focused on new content from the web. Very solid, short and useful for any language.
• Rands newsletter - it covers all aspects of working with software engineers, leading them, teamwork. I'm not certain about the newsletter, but content from the past is simply amazing.
• Senior Engineer Mindset - a newsletter from Swizec Teller, directed mostly towards senior engineers and IC's. Has a lot of great career tips.
• Giant Robots Weekly - a newsletter from Thoughtbot, famous company using Ruby on Rails. Has a lot of powerful insights and clean code, useful for senior engineers.
• TLDR - a new newsletter mostly focused about news in the industry, but good programming articles show up as well. It's really good in a sense that in every issue I find something unique and interesting that cannot be find elsewhere.
• CTO Craft - a similar content to Software Lead Weekly, altough not as good. However, if you're an engineering manager, it may be a really good resource for you.
• Ruby Weekly - official Ruby newsletter with a long, long history. If something important or big enough happens in the Ruby community, most commonly it will appear on this list. However, there are weekly issues where I won't find anything new or interesting, or where I know a good article was deployed on reddit or hacker news, but unfortunately it didn't win a place on a list.

Technical influencers worth observing

I'd say these people are impacting engineering world quite a lot, they create high quality content - it's worth to watch their websites, talks, social media, and more.

• Gregor Hohpe - delivers top quality content about software architecture.
• Uwe Friedrichsen - another author of great articles about distributed systems and approach to architecture.
• Joel Spolsky - a legend 😃
• Jeff Atwood - a creator of a famous "Coding Horror" website.
• Robin Wieruch - one of the most knowledgeable frontend engineers I have ever seen.
• Martin Fowler - another legend who keeps posting interesting posts about architecture and how organizations struggle to build good software.
• Wener Vergel - personal blog of Amazon CTO.

Websites

These websites are generally worth exploring due to a lot of interesting, strategic content, reports or books that they generate. They may not necessarily have the best newsletters or RSS channels though.

Top tier - best quality

• Harvard Business Review - most of the content requires subscription, but sometimes older pieces are accessible to public and usually they are simply fantastic. They also produce a lot of books with a famous series about Empathy covering 14 books and 2320 pages... as you see, they like to go deep.
• First Round Review - quality of content equal to HBR and as actionable as topics from LeadDev. Simply fantastic. They also group content for series dedicated to specific audience, like first-time line managers or managers who start managing other managers.
• Gartner - one of my more recent resources. Their reports and infographics are outstanding, covering topics which are unique and dificult to find in any other website.
• Thoughtworks Tech Radar - fantastic strategic tech discovery and exploration resource. It's great to review it every quarter to know if there are any interesting trends in the industry, either worth adapting or ditching.

Good - worth considering

• Increment - basically a high quality book or digital magazine about creating software, made as a website, split into multiple articles.
• Google Testing Blog - small pills of knowledge here and there.

Learning resources, references, libraries, courses

These are also websites but they work more as a grouped notes on specific topic. Good for reviews and checking from time to time.

• Untools - a bunch of different decision-making, system-thinking, problem solving tools to use.
• MDN Web docs - it's a shame it's not more commonly used by developers. Touches every aspect of web development and it's constantly up to date.
• TestingLibrary - a lot of knowledge about testing in a single place.
• O'Reilly Online Library - I use it every couple days to look for solutions to my problems - in books, courses, articles... worth every penny.
• JavaScript Info - Just a great, online book about JS.
• PromptingGuide.ai - Very fresh guide on AI prompting.
• CPU.land - Great project on learning the fundamentals of CPU inner workings.

Coding practice, tinkering and Katas

So we can hold our skills sharp :)

• Coding Challenges - great ideas for project-based Katas.
• Build your own X - step-by-step guides on build your own Docker, OS, Git and many other famous tech.
• Project based learning - similar concept as above
• Destroy All Software - touches many CS topics worth knowing.
• CodeKata - train over a specific idea with your favorite technology.
• CodeWars - coding riddles.
• AlgoExpert (and others) - tutorial on algorithms and many other fields lately, very comprehensive.
• Drifting Ruby - short videos about Rails.
• GoRails - short videos about Rails.

YouTube

Channels worth watching.

Good - worth considering

• IBM Technology - short, great videos on various topics. Love them!
• ThePrimeTime - pure craziness but I like the energy and primeagen is a really smart and skillful engineer.