Where I get my News
These are some news sources and blogs I read which may be of interest.
Traditional News
The Financial Times
The FT is well known for being the gold standard of financial journalism. During my short time in the industry I haven’t been able to find anything that beats it for the quality and breadth of journalism that it provides. Often the best articles can be found in the premium Lex opinion section and if you have time the Big Read. I don’t actively follow any specific columnists but have found Robin Wigglesworth, the FT’s global finance correspondent, to be quite good.
Financial News (London)
A news source focused on the City of London that I find complements the FT. I often find that after reading an FT article about a company in the City, FN will have a more detailed equivalent if I’m interested in finding out more. Some stories could be considered gossip but provide some colour to general City-sentiment unlike the FT.
Linux Weekly News
A brilliantly written newsletter style publication for those interested in Linux kernel development, security, and Python. The articles range from short concise pieces on a specific topic that has come up in an obscure corner of the Linux world or longer style pieces explaining the history of a utility. The site’s journalism is user submitted and frequently refers directly to the interesting parts of discussions that have taken place on development mailing lists. Content is released weekly to paid subscribers but becomes available to read for free a week after publication.
Blogs
Jake Wharton
Jake is an Android engineer at Square who really cares about his craft, and it shows through his concise and well presented blog posts. I’ve never developed an Android application but still find what he writes interesting. His writing about JVM internals and bytecode optimization is illuminating for anyone developing applications for the JVM. His post about how to create executable Dockerfiles blew me away with how useful and yet so simple it was.
Philipp Hauer
Philipp is a Team Lead at Spreadshirt and is a huge proponent of Kotlin. I discovered his blog, like many others, when trying to figure out how to convince my manager to let me use Kotlin at work. He has some clever ideas about how we should be writing software differently at a conceptual level, but also at a source code level. His post on ‘Modern Best Practices for Testing in Java’ is a reference I come back to time and again, and have recommended it to friends who’ve then shared it at their workplace.
Nikita Prokopov
Nikita’s website is a veritable masterpiece of simple web design, with it’s quirky IBM Plex Sans font, bright yellow background, and beautiful graphics it stands out from the crowd. His blog isn’t just well presented though, it is also intelligently written with some enjoyable snarky humour thrown in. As a senior software engineer at Jetbrains he has recently been working on Java bindings for the 2D graphics library Skia. It’s called Skija and it’s only in public alpha, but it’s definitely one to watch.
Tristan Hume
Tristan is a hardcore programmer, pragmatic problem solver, and self-declared open source enthusiast. He works at Jane Street on low-latency trading systems which is undeniably awesome, but it’s his approach to problem solving that is especially captivating. It’s clear he has put in the hard graft to understand software at a level few do and combines that with an impressive amount of creativity to solve problems you didn’t even know existed. To improve the readability of numbers on his terminal, for instance, he invented a new font with custom font shaping! His long form technical write-ups are second-to-none and his CTF write-ups are surprisingly exciting to read.
News Aggregators
Hacker News
Obligatory reading for any programmer or entrepreneurial type. You can often find something interesting on there although the quality can vary a lot, and the comments sections can leave a lot to be desired. The Algolia search at the bottom of the page can be a great place to start if you know what you’re looking for as an alternative to searching Google for technical blogs.
Lobste.rs
The site is similar to HN except it’s invite only, at least for posting new content, to help combat spam. There is also a requirement that content is tagged which makes it possible to filter only content that you’re interested in. The posts there tend towards detailed technical blogs, academic papers, and source code repositories. The comments there are superb and are often worth a read.