Recently I have been on the hunt for small time software engineering (SWE) blogs and they have been a challenge to find. Criteria for blogs that I would be interested in:
- How old: the blog has to be at least 1 year old
- How often: at least 1 blog post per quarter (4 per year)
- How stale: latest blog post must be posted within the last 3 months
- Author: individual or a small group of authors only (no corporate blogs)
Essentially I want active blogs written by individuals in my space. Is it too much to ask for? 🤔
Search Engine Optimization?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is probably not the first priority for a niche SWE blog. This makes an appearance of such blog posts on the first page of Google rare. Instead you will find a lot of ads, marketing websites, and stale lists of blogs.
I created my own directory of SWE blogs
As a result of my less than resourceful search for good SWE blogs to read, I decided to create my own:
It is an open source directory with a goal of daily updates. Blogs that I have added so far are based on my criteria described above.
The stack
This is a simple static website. Each blog is represented via JSON like so:
{
"url": "https://romantaylor.com",
"rss": "https://romantaylor.com/feed/",
"title": "Roman's Software Engineering Blog",
"description": "Software career tips and open-source projects.",
"tags": "csharp, python, saas, django, career"
}You can find the source code in this GitHub repo. My hope is that the community will find this project useful and I am looking forward to seeing your pull request with your blog info, corrections, and improvements! 🙂
