Blogs are an excellent place to pick up tips and techniques and in general to better keep up to date with technology. They're also just fun places to check out daily to see what other people are working on. Which is what I hope this blog achieves at some point.
And personally for me, it's a good place to get the old brain working. So much time nowadays just goes to watching 20-30 clips on YouTube for hours on end. It's good to know that writing is still alive and well on the internet. Here is a list, in no particular order, of some of the blogs that I check out often.
Coding4Fun is an excellent place for those hobby developers that need a fresh idea or two. It is a part of Channel9, which offers all kinds of content from the people at Microsoft. I was a frequent visitor of this blog when I was first starting off in my programming career as I wanted to get ideas on what to build and how to build it.
During those first few critical years of my programming career, many of my projects were based off of the ones listed on Coding4Fun, with my own variations and tweaks thrown in. Good blog, with good ideas. And it helps you do exactly what it says. Code 4 Fun.
If you're an active web developer, then this is a great blog to follow. It offers info on the latest happenings at Google, such as their open sourced products and their many API's. There are tons of coding samples for many of the topics covered. And essentially it is a hub to many of the developer sections all over Google. Whether its an update to their material design specs or a new SDK coming out, this is the place to find out.
CodingHorror is written by Jeff Atwood, and is the first technical blog that I ever visited consistently in my life as a developer. If you don't know the name Jeff Atwood, he is one of the founders of StackExchange, the most important website for technology today probably. Jeff doesn't update his blog as frequently now, but I think he's done enough in its 10 year life. His blog is just covered with gems of insight into development and the world of programming.
He's written alot in ten years, I'll say that. His blog spans about 280 pages worth of blog posts ranging from his thoughts on technology trends to how to clean your display and keyboard. And tons of other things in between. And in general it's just a fun read from someone who's built plenty in his life.
Scott Hanselman is a programmer, teacher, and public speaker. He currently works for Microsoft for the Web Platform Team and maintains this blog on the side. Scott's been blogging for over a decade about technology, programming, gadgets, you name it. And it's a big blog, I'll say that. Scott's done alot so if you'r interested in cloud computing you'll find something. If you're interested in Raspberry Pi you'll find something.
Yes it does. This one of my favorite blogs for web development. It's run by Google and features content that isn't for the faint of heart. These are complex topics, but that's what makes it such a good blog. It doesn't get updated as frequently as others, but there's enough material to keep you reading for a while. It covers every from animations to performance in JavaScript and does it with plenty of code and images to help draw a good picture.
If you want to stay ahead of the curve in web development, this is a definitely a good blog to follow.
Smashing Magazine is a web designer's playhouse. If you're a serious designer then this is a good place to pick up some tips that you may not have know about before. I'm not a designer by any means, but I've made use of many of the topics there plenty of times. And more recently some of the topics have moved beyond design and have focused more on different types of web technologies like node.js for example.
So those are some of my favorite blogs to just sit back and read when I get a chance. They're great places to pick up some new info. And when I'm bored, instead of heading on over to YouTube to have it recommend a random video that will undoubtedly lead me to hours of animals performing tricks videos, I head on over to these blogs instead. Happy reading!
Walter Guevara is a software engineer, startup founder and currently teaches programming for a coding bootcamp. He is currently building things that don't yet exist.
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