> I view that as a sign there’s a desperate shortage of understandable explanation of technical topics. There’s nothing here that most of my co-workers don’t know (with the exception of maybe three or four posts where I propose novel ideas). It’s just that they don’t blog and I do. I’m not going to try to convince you to start writing a blog, since that has to be something you want to do, but I will point out that there’s a large gap that’s waiting to be filled by your knowledge. When I started writing this blog, I figured almost no one would ever read it; sure Joel Spolsky and Steve Yegge created widely read blogs, but that was back when almost no one was blogging. Now that there are millions of blogs, there’s just no way to start a new blog and get noticed. Turns out that’s not true.
I really think there is a shortage of understandable explanations of technical topics, and I see new people writing great posts clarifying complicated technical topics all the time. And I find people really do notice/appreciate it. So if you're excited about blogging, maybe do it :)
I second Andy wingo's wingolog.org . By far the blog that has helped me the most in bridging academia and practical implementation (to be fair though, I have been working a lot with cml and delimited continuations lately, which has been a big theme the last years).
a few of my favorite blogs:
- http://blog.acolyer.org for fantastic daily summaries of CS papers.
- http://stephaniehurlburt.com/blog/ -- she has a business creating a new compression algorithm and I love reading about it
- https://rachelbythebay.com/w/ is pure gold for weird debugging stories
- https://accidentallyquadratic.tumblr.com/ is always a fun read
- http://wingolog.org/ on building compilers
- http://composition.al/blog -- Lindsey Kuper on her programming languages research
- aphyr's blog on distributed systems, of course
- https://charity.wtf/
- http://www.pgbovine.net/writings.htm -- Philip Guo is a CS professor whose blog on his experiences in academia I really like
- http://whilefalse.blogspot.com by Camille Fournier, mostly on engineering management
- http://larahogan.me/blog/ by Lara Hogan, on engineering management
Also I think this comment from Dan's blog (https://danluu.com/about/) is very true and important:
> I view that as a sign there’s a desperate shortage of understandable explanation of technical topics. There’s nothing here that most of my co-workers don’t know (with the exception of maybe three or four posts where I propose novel ideas). It’s just that they don’t blog and I do. I’m not going to try to convince you to start writing a blog, since that has to be something you want to do, but I will point out that there’s a large gap that’s waiting to be filled by your knowledge. When I started writing this blog, I figured almost no one would ever read it; sure Joel Spolsky and Steve Yegge created widely read blogs, but that was back when almost no one was blogging. Now that there are millions of blogs, there’s just no way to start a new blog and get noticed. Turns out that’s not true.
I really think there is a shortage of understandable explanations of technical topics, and I see new people writing great posts clarifying complicated technical topics all the time. And I find people really do notice/appreciate it. So if you're excited about blogging, maybe do it :)