As a Software Architect, being aware and gaining broader context is a table-stakes in the current environment. But with information overload with many sources (social media, blogs, news articles, etc.), it is essential to prioritize your reading preferences.
The decision to what to read and what not to read is a personal decision and your area of interest/skillset (user experience, web, data, integration, machine learning / artificial intelligence, IoT, DevOps, etc.) also drives your reading priorities
With the above context, you can prepare your own personal reading list but this article is outlining engineering blogs every architect should read (segmented into knowledge category) as a generalist to cover different aspects of architecture. Though most of these blogging sites cover topics from all of these domains, the areas mentioned below have been considered more informative.
# 1 – Software Architecture & Design
- InfoQ – covers architecture, design, culture & methods, engineering topics (Data, AI, ML, DevOps) with articles by renowned authors with 250K+ subscribers. Also, published guides (minibooks), podcasts, and presentations.
- DZone – covers many topics including Agile, DevOps, Cloud, Big Data, IoT, Microservices, DevOps, and many more with 2M+ subscribers. Also, publishes refcards (cheat sheets), research, and webinars.
- OReilly – Although there is a paid service, their blog is a great source of cloud and next-generation architecture, which is accessible to all. Also, have research, deep-dive, signals (new ideas/tools), and commentary (perspectives) as separate areas.
# 2 – Cloud Architecture
No surprise in this area that you following 3 key cloud service providers’ blog, that should be sufficient to cover key reference architecture, guidelines, best practices, lessons learned, etc.:
# 3 – User Experience
While there are many players, following three key engineering blogs considering their contribution to the community and opensource:
- Airbnb Engineering – while they have several areas (Opensource, AI, Data, Mobile, Infrastructure) – particularly Web (UI) has very interesting blogs about TypeScript, JavaScript, Rendering, React, and related technologies.
- Instagram Engineering – Provides very insightful articles on Mobile experience (Android and iOS ) focused on performance and rendering.
- Twitter Engineering – With many contributions to opensource, there are many libraries and utilities they contributed. Blogs related to UI and many more areas are great sources of engineering innovations.
#4 – Data, ML & AI
The rationale behind listing only three blog sites is not to overwhelm and provide these key blogs to get started with. While Facebook & Uber blogs provide real-world use-cases, Kaggle provides the platform for learning and experiments:
- Facebook Engineering – Though they publish on various topics – Infrastructure, Platform, and Video Engineering – they have really great content on AI & ML considering heavy usage of these technologies by Facebook.
- Uber Engineering Blog – With real-world scalability and machine learning challenges, it provides insights into engineering work behind the Uber platform.
- Kaggle – One-stop-shop to find all the code (400K+ notebooks) & data (50K+ public datasets) you need to do your data science work
#5 – Microservices & Cloud-native
- Martin Fowler (Personal Blog) – As a thought leader, Martin Fowler introduced many patterns such as circuit breaker and shares testing approach, continuous delivery practices, continuous integration patterns, and many more.
- Microservices.io – From foundational elements to microservices design patterns, this site covers most of the topics related to Microservices architecture
- Netflix Tech Blog – Netflix is a golden source of many great engineering stories and their contribution to Microservices, Cloud-native architecture with chaos engineering has been phenomenal.
#6 – Infrastructure & DevOps
To conclude, the above-curated sites are pointers to get started towards expanding your knowledge as a software architect. Keep reading and sharing your knowledge with the community.
Other Engineering Sites
Note: This GitHub repo contains an A-Z listing of all engineering blogs.
