In 2024 I started a Software Engineering Blog Directory to enable easier discovery of active software engineering blogs. Although some directories with similar content already exist, they are never up-to-date and feature many stale blogs. Additionally they are difficult, if not impossible, to contribute to.
The most popular of these directories seems to be this one. From what I can tell, it is not maintained.
As of January 2025:
- Last commit was 7 months ago.
- There are 111 open pull requests as of January 2025.
- Issues with titles like this are unaddressed: “Please Merge the pending PR’s“
It seems that directories of software engineering blogs eventually become abandoned. Probably because they are a lot of busy work for the author. As a result, my goal is to make sweblogs.fyi as hands-off as possible.
Simplicity and maintainability at the core
I want this project to be as simple as possible. Other developers should be able to open a pull request without spending hours reading documentation. This means a couple of things to me:
Use languages most developers understand
I am committed to using only most common languages in this project. This means no Ruby or Perl will be found in this repository 😁. Right now the project is almost 100% HTML, CSS with a single Python script. Some JavaScript will likely be added in 2025 to enable search functionality.
Minimize dependencies
Dependencies will only be added if absolutely necessary to improve quality of life. Currently the build script is relying on jinja2 (for templates) and feedparser (for RSS/Atom feed parsing). I do foresee a need for a SQL library in the future (more on this below 👇).
As static as possible
Currently, GitHub actions pipeline builds a set of simple static pages and upload them to a server with an FTP. I am not entirely sure if long-term this is still going to be the most efficient strategy. For now, I am keeping it static.
Automate
In the interest of keeping this project alive, I must ensure that it can continue operating while I am “away from my keyboard”. To accomplish this, I will continue leveraging free GitHub actions runners to automate test, build, and deployment.
For public repositories, jobs using the workflow labels shown in the table below will run on virtual machines with the associated specifications. The use of these runners on public repositories is free and unlimited.
– GitHub
Goals for 2025
Given the constraints described above, I have following goals in mind:
Fresh blogs
Currently there are 76 blogs featured in the directory. This year I would like to increase the number of blogs by 1 per week on average.
Statistics page
It would be cool to have a statistics page that shows:
- Number of website visitors
- Total number of blogs
- Most popular blogs
- Most active blogs
Of course this would be easy to do with a SQL database… Can I manage with just JSON and statistic HTML pages? 🧙♂️
Search engine
Probably the most important feature that currently does not exist is search. My intention is to play around with some lightweight front-end JavaScript search engines and see if it’s a good fit for this project.
Show relevant blog posts
Right now you can only sort blogs based on the 5 tags assigned to each blog entry:
Unfortunately there is no way to do the same for individual blog posts. My vision for 2025: when you select a tag of interest, you will see both blogs (current feature) and individual blog posts (future feature) on this topic.
Sources
- Minimal CSS Framework for Semantic HTML: https://picocss.com/
- Most used programming languages among developers worldwide as of 2024: https://www.statista.com/statistics/793628/worldwide-developer-survey-most-used-languages/
- Version Control Platforms: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-version-control-version-control-platforms
- Software Engineering Blog Directory on GitHub: https://github.com/rtdev-com/swe-blog-directory
