Ask HN: What are the best engineering blogs with real-world depth?

1 day ago

I’m looking for examples of high-quality engineering blog posts—especially from tech company blogs, that go beyond surface-level explanations.

Specifically interested in posts that: 1. Explain technical concepts clearly and concisely 2. Show real implementation details, trade-offs, and failures 3. Are well-structured and readable 4. Tie engineering decisions back to business or product outcomes

Any standout blogs, posts, or platforms you regularly learn from?

132 comments

nishilpatel

Reply
pella  1 day ago

> especially from tech company blogs,

https://engineering.fb.com/

https://netflixtechblog.com/

https://stripe.com/blog/engineering

https://eng.uber.com

https://engineering.linkedin.com/

https://engineering.atspotify.com/

https://tailscale.com/blog

https://careersatdoordash.com/engineering-blog/

https://dropbox.tech/

--

Aggregators:( https://engineering.fyi/ ; https://diff.blog/ )

+ https://hn.algolia.com/?query=engineering%20blog

---

create a public engineering-blog SKILL.md. ( ~ collect the writing patterns that work on HN )

iancmceachern  1 day ago

It's so interesting to me as a Mechanical Engineer and Hardware designer/architect how on HN "Engineering" almost always means "Software engineering" here.

  • throwaway4PP  20 hours ago

    It is funny, almost as funny as an entire cadre of people with “engineer” in their title who've never had to draw a free body diagram, learn circuit analysis, understand the basics of thermodynamics, or the mechanics of materials.

    • p2detar  20 hours ago

      I hold a CS master degree from an Eastern European university and everything you listed was in our Bachelor degree program. It’s pretty funny because while studying material properties back then I always wondered how and when am I gonna use that. It kind of makes sense now that I think about it - some students preferred branching out to hardware.

      edit: typo

      4 replies →

  • CommenterPerson  17 hours ago

    Hear hear. The word "Technology" has also been redefined to mean computer or phone stuff. As a real (manly) engineer, this pisses me off no end! :-)

    To answer the OP, this Civil engineering blog / video site is really good. I always learn something new, and his enthusiasm is infectious. Well worth giving it a look:

    https://practical.engineering/

  • jvanderbot  21 hours ago

    I would love more blogs on mechanical, hardware, and especially industrial engineering, but the demographics in those areas skew stereo-typically older and also likely less blog-oriented, right?

    • georgeburdell  21 hours ago

      Blogs are almost 30 years old at this point, but yes, I do associate a nearly compulsive need to show off one's work in meticulously-crafted blog posts with younger people.

    • wheelinsupial  20 hours ago

      Depending on what you're looking for in industrial engineering, there are a lot of blogs on lean manufacturing and the Toyota Production System. INFORMS, may be paywalled, also publishes a lot of pretty interesting articles on applications of operations research to industry.

      In general, though, my very limited experience working in manufacturing was that much of the blog equivalents were covered in things like white papers from hardware manufacturers or articles in trade publications. We always had a bunch of magazines delivered each month and there were usually some interesting articles to review.

  • nishilpatel  9 hours ago

    Fair Observation, HN surrounded by mostly Software guys, which directly add nuances of "Engineering" and <Software> Engineering.

    but to specific is much important, imo Engineering means "Solving problem at a scale", irrelevant of the industry.

    • h3half  1 hour ago

      Perhaps. Sometimes the scale is "one" - the amount of engineering that goes into bespoke space missions is very large, and very little of that work is re-used for anything other than direct follow up missions

  • eru  8 hours ago

    Well, engineer without any qualification used to refer only to combat engineers. (The term civil engineering betrays that history.)

    Words change meaning over time and with the audience.

  • metadope  18 hours ago

    I remember feeling sheepish when I was hired to a position titled 'Software Engineer'. To me, those two words together seemed incongruent. Not quite an oxymoron but certainly a puzzlement.

    Maybe, generously, in retrospect, an aspiration?

    I never considered myself an actual engineer; I was (and still am) a self-taught un-credentialed computer programmer. More art than science. They made me take the title and the stock options and the business cards.

    I mostly worked for and with EEs, making software tools for test automation. I was a fanboy hardware wannabee (and still am), got some on me but was never a true engineer. I learned from those who practiced their discipline; it was plain to me the reality of real engineering versus what I was doing.

    I suppose in my travels I have on occasion encountered a true Software Engineer. I suppose there's reason to hope that software development will continue to mature and evolve, and eventually the other engineering disciplines will accept software as a science.

    For me, it will always be a joy to make that hardware work with my twiddly bits. Not engineering, no. But very rewarding work that often resembles engineering.

  • sp4nner  19 hours ago

    Agreed, though I understand the YC bias. I'm in biotech and mostly follow HN just to see what the software people are interested in these days.

  • mrandish  14 hours ago

    Yeah, even as a software engineering type I immediately thought the question was too broadly posed. I assume the OP must have had something narrower in mind.

sateesh  1 day ago

https://jvns.ca/ Not a tech. company blog. Explains technical concepts clearly and top notch technical posts. Fits 1,2, 3 criteria of what you ask, though not the 4th one.

  • john-tells-all  19 hours ago

    Strong recommend! Julia's posts are always really engaging and educational.

    She also publishes a number of technical topics as ZINES. I bought her "Oh Shit, Git!" zine and learned a ton of useful info, despite having decades in the industry.Zines are a great way to encourage book-allergic coworkers into learning great material.

    https://wizardzines.com/

  • skywhopper  21 hours ago

    Yes! Julia is fantastic at explaining concepts, and creating ways to learn about them. She produces a great series of “zines” summarizing a bunch of technical topics, her blog archives are really fascinating, and she’s created really useful tools like Mess With DNS (https://messwithdns.net) which gives you your own DNS subdomain and the means to update records so you can try things out in an easy, harmless way.

vmilner  1 hour ago

I enjoy

https://destevez.net/about/

from a Phd maths guy, who's worked in satellite comms, and blogs on software defined radio and comms protocols (eg error correction and radio modulation, often in space related contexts, eg decoding Voyager comms).

yrand  1 day ago

Encountered one specific example about a month ago here on HackerNews - All about automotive lidar. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46110395

Blog posts where I find quality really shows are usually about something I know next to nothing about how it works. A badly written article usually either goes really shallow or skips some facts when going into depth and requires catchup elsewhere to actually understand it. The lidar article from Main Street Autonomy goes beyond basics and explained everything from the ground up in such a connected way that it was a real pleasure reading it.

qznc  1 day ago

Sounds like you look for an intersection of academic papers (1.), tech blogs (2.), text books (3.), and confidential business strategies (4.)? A very high ambition.

  • cess11  20 hours ago

    Corporations commonly describe some of their internal processes and achievements because it builds reputation and that can be important for both sales and recruitment.

    Sometimes they do it in the form of free or open source software releases.

nchmy  1 day ago

You're probably looking for something that is more focused on specific software decisions/implementations, but https://infrequently.org is the best web development blog out there.

It's not "technical" so much as it just educates you on how to be a good web developer/run a team. There's zero fluff and considerable detail (footnotes are practically blog posts themselves).

ludicity  1 day ago

I'm a huge fan of https://eblog.fly.dev/index.html. The author, Efron, very graciously advises me on a lot of little things around my engineering practice, and I've learned a huge amount about weird holes in my practice from industry dysfunction in a very short period of time from him.

bodash  20 hours ago

> https://lessnews.dev

A while ago I felt this "information fatigue" due to the overwhelming updates from the typical news sources (reddit, twitter, even hn).

So I built a _slow_ webdev newsfeed aggregator that doesn't overwhelm you of constant updates, so you focus on reading the actual blog contents and enjoy other things.

  • ewoodrich  18 hours ago

    I bookmarked to take a closer look later, but I'm a little unclear on the premise, could you explain what you mean by "slow"/how it is filtered/curated?

    • bodash  13 hours ago

      Sure.

      Problem I had with the other newsfeeds is that I get distracted by the constant updates, always refresh the front-page, skipping the actual content and just skimming through headlines and comments.

      So I built this one, set it as my homepage, and because it doesn't update often, I will actually read the content of the links. When I'm done, I move on to other things in life.

      It's curated by matching keywords (focusing on web development) on HN, mostly automated but with few manual adjustments now and then.

iillexial  17 hours ago

Hey! Check out https://devblogs.sh. It's a curated library with tech blog from companies, as well as individuals and conferences. Every blog is hand picked. There is also AI agent which you can use for quick search.

NickJLange  1 day ago

A lot of great links here to the firehose (or at least for working parents). Unless someone has built it - anything that aggregates and shows beyond the first click of the by-line. (i.e. a first paragraph, or LLM-summary of the content)?

Otherwise... coming soon from a vibe-coding session near you...

  • soulofmischief  21 hours ago

    A friend and I worked on a startup together that did this back when only the GPT-3 API was available. Sucked up everything we could think of, including HN and traditionally opaque sources such as Telegram

  • SleepySteve_sk  21 hours ago

    We're currently building something to solve this problem.

    https://joinheader.com/

    We'll filter an RSS feed based on the topic and description that you provide. Feel free to reach out to me at s.kufuor@<domain> if you have any questions or feedback.

ruraljuror  18 hours ago

The book Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann covers exactly the topics you are asking about and references many blog posts.

vibesareoff  1 day ago

Ask the LLM you wrote this post with!

  • robofanatic  15 hours ago

    No need to harshly judge the OP for merely using a tool. Also you wouldn’t have known some of the blogs listed here if he hadn’t asked it publicly.

  • voxleone  21 hours ago

    No judgement here whatsoever, but i think LLM would be "the" tool for this job. I also wonder if there's any point to "Ask" sections in websites after LLM's.

  • bell-cot  1 day ago

    OP is asking a good question. There's no dishonor if he is not fluent in English, and used an LLM to translate.

    • vibesareoff  1 day ago

      "OP" couldn't even be bothered to reformat the numbered list to run on separate fucking lines.

      But sure, cheer on the homogenization of online spaces into beige slop staccato bullshit!

      ˙ ͜ʟ˙

      7 replies →

mitjam  1 day ago

Maybe it's just because I'm LLMing a bit too much, recently, but this question sounds to me like a prompt.

  • x187463  1 day ago

    Some people act like the use of an LLM immediately invalidates or lowers the value of a piece of content. But the case of a question or simple post, especially by somebody for whom English is second language, using an LLM to rephrase or clean-up some text seems like an innocent and practical use case for LLMs.

  • runlaszlorun  1 day ago

    I'm not beating up on OP but I chuckled when I read the question. Literally the only place I see the phrase "no fluff" with any frequency is with Deepseek lol.

    Nothing wrong with the phrase itself of course, other than the fact that it's like literally in every other reply for me lol.

  • atoav  1 day ago

    Had the same thought. ChatGPT often tells me things like: "This is the hard truth" or "I am telling it to you as it is (no fluff)" or whatever. Just because my initial prompt contains a line about it not making things up and telling me how things are instead of what would please me to hear. I added a line to specifically tell it to not phrase out these things, but it appears to be surprisingly hard to get rid of those phrases.

rramadass  1 day ago

Not a blog, but books detailing real-world experiences from Indian Engineers/Scientists/Researchers; Quite inspiring to see how people strive unceasingly towards a goal in spite of all the limitations and hurdles (viz. Political/Financial/Material etc.) imposed on them.

There is much to learn, in these books.

The Mind of an Engineer by Purnendu Ghosh et al. - https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-10-0119-2

The Mind of an Engineer: Volume 2 by Purnendu Ghosh et al. - https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-15-1330-5

Joel_Mckay  1 day ago

These should be read at least once in your life if interested in building industrial grade electrical, mechanical, and or software.

1. https://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/

2. https://standards.nasa.gov/standard/NASA/NASA-STD-87394

3. https://standards.nasa.gov/NASA-Technical-Standards

4. https://sma.nasa.gov/sma-disciplines/workmanship

5. https://www.stroustrup.com/JSF-AV-rules.pdf

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_Dev...

7. https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/laboratory-metrology/metrology-...

8. https://www.mitutoyo.com/training-education/

9. "Memoirs of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds" (Charles Mackay, 1852, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm )

The artifacts are usually beautiful from good Workmanship Standards, Design For Manufacturability, and systematic Metrology. Dragging us all into the future one project at a time.

Note that training an ML model with such data would be pointless, as statistical saliency forms a paradox with consumer product design compromises. Note, there are _always_ tradeoffs in every problem domain.

'What it actually means to be "AI Generated"' ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERiXDhLHxmo )

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXbzktx1KfU

Have a nice day, and note >52% of the web is LLM slop now. YMMV =3

gethly  1 day ago

There are no such blogs. Usually companies, or individuals, will write these after they implement some feature into their products. Which makes them inherently little pieces of information scattered all over the internet and there is no one blog that is just about this.

  • nishilpatel  9 hours ago

    That’s true. This kind of writing usually shows up as post-implementation retrospectives, so it’s inherently fragmented.

    I’m trying to surface and study those scattered examples—especially the ones that explain why decisions were made, not just what was built.