Reasons blogs are awesome:
- Subscribing gives you get a consistent supply of great reading material.
- They’re much more varied and information-dense than books.
- You get to learn how people think.
- It’s way better than social media for keeping in actual touch with friends.
Here are some of my favorites!
(If you have a blog you think I’d like, you should email it to me! I promise to read at least one post and leave a comment. If I’m excited enough I’ll subscribe or add it here too.)
Underappreciated
Cold Takes: the best from-scratch explanation of some of the ideas that have been the most important to my life and career goals. Written by one of the most smart and reasonable people I know, about how he came to believe some pretty wild things. All Possible Views About Humanity’s Future Are Wild , The Most Important Century (in a nutshell).
Otherwise: by Julia Wise, one of the OG effective altruists and an extremely thoughtful and kind person. Primarily about effective altruism and parenting. Cheerfully (from her old blog), Parenting expectations and experiences.
Construction Physics: former construction engineer writes fascinating deep dives for construction non-experts. Another day in Katerradise, Comparing flooring systems, Why it’s hard to innovate in construction.
Compass Rose: figuring out social technology. Why I am not a Quaker, Sabbath hard and go home.
Don’t Worry About the Vase: guy with a lot of interesting mental models that are probably related to his experience playing competitive games (largely Magic). Slack, Play in Hard Mode.
Commonplace: “My primary recipe here is ’take interesting idea that seems to be useful, try it out in my career, and then write up the results.’” Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice. The mental model fallacy.
Dominic Cummings: The smartest/most original political practitioner I’m aware of. Also directed the pro-Brexit referendum campaign. The blog has a surprising amount of real talk given the famousness/importance of the people involved. Advice to new political advisers, postmortem of the Brexit vote (ctrl-f for “Why do it?” for why he was pro-Brexit).
Tynan: guy who optimizes his life in unusual ways to an absurd degree. An Island, Vegas, Budapest for A Fraction of the Median House Price (later: We Bought a Tokyo Apartment and I’m Done With Real Estate). Gear post 2020.
Dan Luu: well-reasoned, clear, and thorough thoughts on mostly tech-related things. Why is software so buggy? Why is that company so big?
The sideways view: a smart and original person writing about random things he’s interested in. Analyzing divestment. Policy Potpourri.
Alexey Guzey: “I aim to write things that are useful. My long-term goal is to make the future humane, aesthetic, and to make it happen faster. My biggest intellectual influences are Scott Alexander and Gwern.” How Life Sciences Actually Work. Why You Should Start A Blog Right Now. What Should You Do with Your Life?.
Fantastic Anachronism: maybe easiet to let it be defined by its content. What’s Wrong with Social Science and How to Fix It: Reflections After Reading 2578 Papers, When the Worst Man in the World Writes a Masterpiece.
Resident Contrarian: “This blog used to be about disagreeing with arguments. Now it’s sort of about things that are roughly in line with heuristics for assessing the world and the people in it, informal philosophy, wry prose-based semi-jokes and vulnerability.” On The Experience of Being Poor-ish, For People Who Aren’t. What Does “Shitty Job” Mean in The Low-Skill, Low-Pay World?
Programming
Software engineering blogs seem especially vulnerable to Sturgeon’s Law; I’ve only found a few consistently good ones.
Brandur: Collection of awesome tactics for common problems with web app backends. If you work on one you’ll probably learn something immediately applicable to your work from almost every post. Try his great series on using database transactions to make distributed systems safe and predictable (1, 2, 3, 4).
Programming Is Terrible: Great general programming advice with some focus on maintaining large-scale systems. How do you cut a monolith in half? Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend.
Stay SaaSy: anonymous senior product manager + engineering manager writing up their experience. How to run a department, Build Your Career on Dirty Work, Notes and Errata (from previous posts).
Marc Brooker: an extremely experienced AWS distributed systems engineer with a good knack for distilling his knowledge. Fixing retries with token buckets and circuit breakers, Histogram vs. eCDF.
The Amazon Builders’ Library: basically more of the above. Timeouts, retries, and backoff with jitter (by Marc Brooker!), Making retries safe with idempotent APIs .
Irrational Exuberance!: Huge repository of concrete advice on engineering management. There’s something of an index at My rails for engineering leadership. Migrations: the sole scalable fix to tech debt. Sizing engineering teams. Introduction to architecting systems for scale.
Ted Kaminski: 60+ insightful essays on software design. Themes include reasoning compositionally, choosing abstractions, and poking holes in common heuristics for “good design.” Read the whole archive (really)! His most recent book outline contains many of the greatest hits.
Tristan Hume: various amazing side projects plus thoughts on programming. Teleforking a process onto a different computer! Comparing the same project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml. (Honorable mention: My Tungsten Cube.)
Great but not underappreciated
These are awesome but also seem well-known among the kind of people I’d expect to like them so I’m not going to write up descriptions.
Kalzumeus (Patrick McKenzie; more active on Twitter as @patio11. Wish he’d turn his tweets into a blog…)
Podcasts
I don’t really know the best way to link to podcasts, but I think I’m supposed to tell you to just search for them in your podcast app?
EconTalk: probably the most varied selection of interviewees. The host (Russ Roberts) has a fairly predictable ideology and often asks questions from that angle, but is reasonably good at not letting it dominate or get in the way.
Conversations with Tyler [Cowen]: similar to the above, but different economist. Interviews are faster paced and more conversational.
80,000 Hours: conversations about lots of different parts of the effective altruism scene. Personal favorite episode so far was the interview of Christine Peterson, who spent a lot of time in a previous generation of effective-altruist-like movements.
Dormant; read the archives
I wish there was a better way to read blog archives than “all at once at 2 AM.” If only more people made reverse RSS feeds like Jeff Kaufman.
I’m probably biased
…because I know the authors. But also, I often like them because they have interesting thoughts which they also write about: