As developers involved in quite an exponentially growing discipline, we could surely make use of all accessible mediums to keep us updated on the latest libraries, how-to guides, trending technologies, developer news, and so on and so forth. Hence where the extremely useful medium of dev blogs comes into play. Because you might be a beginner wondering which language to use to print your first “Hello world”. Or a professional developer looking for the most efficient design pattern applicable to your problem. Or anyone in between. Either way, chances are there’s a blog post exploring your exact concern; one that’s ready to provide you with the precise knowledge needed to tackle it!
But, with the ever-growing rate of new blogs, it could get pretty hard to choose the must-reads among them. That’s why we at Lokalise thought of curating a conclusive list of the best dev blogs around, just for you.
Hence, let us introduce you to some excellent dev blogs, to accompany you through your developer journey in 2023, and beyond!
A List Apart
Initially launched in 1997 by American entrepreneur Jeffrey Zeldman, A List Apart is a web-technology-related online magazine. This dev blog aims at scouring the “design, development, and meaning of web content” while prioritizing web standards and best practices. Although the blog is decades old, it’s still somewhat active. Hence, as a web designer/developer, you could expect to read around two to four quite long posts each month.
freeCodeCamp
freeCodeCamp is a popular community blog striving to hone your coding skills by supplying loads of how-to guides and tips. This particular dev blog covers a broad range of timely programming-related topics. And, the blog is admirably active holding blogs posted by various contributing authors in an almost daily fashion.
freeCodeCamp platform extends to an active forum as well which holds community discussions on subforums. Moreover, these subforums range from languages like Python, JavaScript, to generic subforums like “Project Feedback”, “Career Advice”. Notably, freeCodeCamp even holds a dedicated Chinese forum with its own server in Asia for faster access. And, guess what? the freeCodeCamp platform that provides all this to you is a 100% free donation-based platform!
DEV Community
As is quite evident from the blog’s name itself, DEV Community is about gathering software developers around the world as one global community to share development-related posts. Led by three developers, namely Ben Halpern (Co-CEO), Jess Lee (COO), and Peter Frank (Co-CEO), its blog acts as a “constructive and inclusive social network” featuring software development-related posts published by members of the community which other members can react, comment and subscribe to–much like in a usual social media platform. DEV Community members are also encouraged to host podcasts on the platform. Thanks to its social media-like nature, DEV Community can be called one of the highly active dev blogs reaching close to a dozen blog posts per hour and close to 300 per day.
DZone
If you’re planning to be a technology professional or you’re already one, DZone is a blog you should surely keep in your arsenal of top dev blogs. This blog lets you discover the “latest technology trends and learn about new technologies, methodologies, and best practices” and you’re sure to never run out of posts to read with DZone being a pretty active blog that posts about 10 to 20 posts per day.
Their website hosts more or less a basic interface. Regardless, their posts would barely leave anything to your imagination utilizing code snippets, images, videos to get their ideas across. DZone blog’s most prominent attraction would arguably be their huge collection of cheat sheets—or in their words, the “refcardz“—that would be a crime not to bookmark on your browser! And what’s more? They’d only ask you to get a 100% free membership to access all these goodies.
SD Times
This one doesn’t fall under the category of dev blogs, per se. Instead, it’s the latest news on software development published in SD Times magazine published by D2 Emerge presented to you in reverse chronological order, much like in a blog! SD Times brings along an active stream of fresh technology trends neatly packed in a news-like interface and averaging 15 to 20 posts per week.
SCAND blog
A corporate dev blog that deserved a spot on our list simply due to the valuable and elaborate posts they publish; and speaking of which, they make sure to release once or twice each week. SCAND blog is all about sharing their knowledge and experience in the custom software development industry, related technology trends, and benchmarks. Their blog posts don’t constraint to just one technology; instead, they cover areas like mobile/web development, technology trends, and much more in long posts accompanied by helpful infographics.
bol.com Techlab
An insider’s view of an e-commerce platform’s engineering challenges can be quite an eye-opener for us developers. Well, guess what? bol.com Techlab blog and their podcast do exactly that! They let us in on how bol.com developers overcome those challenges using various designs, architectures, technologies, etc. You could expect around one or two quite long dev blog articles per month from these guys.
Phys.org
A UK-based science news aggregator Phys.org manages a technology-news/software branch that puts together the latest software-related news for the reader. As can be expected from a news website, we couldn’t calculate a stable frequency of articles to its technology-news/software branch. Based on the last 10 weeks (starting from the time of writing), Phys.org had published about 4 posts per/week.
Honeypot
Honeypot is another corporate dev blog that aims at advising developers on their career development. Supplying loads of blog content under topics such as “career” and “leadership”, and tags like “career development”, “career search”, “work life balance”, Honeypot provides a great initiative for developers to receive career counseling no one probably gave them in person. They publish about 5 blog posts per month, and in addition, Honeypot also puts forth a nice collection of videos and podcasts.
ProgrammableWeb
Founded by John Musser in 2005, the ProgrammableWeb platform currently acts as the largest API directory in the world. And, its blog doesn’t disappoint either posting about one or two dev blog articles daily about all things related to APIs. Notably, the website provides us with free tips giving an introduction to APIs, and also links to an API University providing free API-related courses.
net solutions
Focusing on e-commerce related particulars, netsolutions.com/insights/ provides you not just with a detailed & updated dev blog, but also an e-commerce associated knowledge hub and a collection of eBooks. The blog consists of a nice & simple interface featuring pretty long posts along with related images. net solution‘s dev blog is quite active but be that as it may, there doesn’t seem to be a set schedule for the posts. Hence, on a happy week, you would be able to find 5 or 6 blog posts; and contrastingly, some weeks might pass with just a single blog post or two.
TSH
In case you’re in search of dev blogs that are a touch more emphasized on software development practices, the blog from The Software House can be called a safe bet. Holding a quite amusing theme with their posts filled with memes, the TSH blog features pretty long posts focusing on both Back-end & Front-end web technologies along with code snippets, images, and even GIFs. In current times, you can expect TSH to post around one to two posts each week.
Plutora
Plutora dev blog is about letting you know of all the techniques, tips, and latest trends when it comes to the delivery of software. Mainly exploring DevOps, agile methodology, and project management, their blog posts release about one to two times per week.
CodeIT
Have a look at this dev blog to get some awareness, opinions, and to explore use cases in the field of mobile & web development. Apart from genuinely useful tips & tricks, the CodeIT blog features their data analytics, technology reviews, and news updates on mobile and web development-related matters. You could expect a blog or two every week from CodeIT, but having said that, don’t get surprised on the occasional “no posts” week!
The Daily WTF
Starting with the almost taboo website name, The Daily WTF is a pretty out-of-the-box dev blog that focuses on advising developers on what not to do. The writers post instances where they encountered inexcusably bad code in their personal day-to-day lives, and how those negatively affected their programs and projects. The Daily WTF blog keeps to the schedule and posts its content daily (except for the weekends) inside a simple but catchy interface.
Toptal
Toptal is a seemingly active dev blog posting content under loads of categories like “Back-end”, “Web Front-end”, “Engineering Management”, “Data Science and Databases”, “Project Management” just to name a few. Their blog mainly contains how-to guides, explanations, comparisons, and tips presented in a quite eye-candy interface. In case you wondered about that “seemingly” adverb, that was added since unfortunately, it’s difficult to calculate Toptal‘s blog post frequency as none of their articles contain the days they were published on!
Docker blog
What “top dev blogs” list would be complete without an entry to the quite trendy topic of Docker? This is their official blog hosting guides and latest updates on Docker. Being a corporate blog, let’s not expect blogs from them every day; but if you’re keen on connecting with the Docker community, make sure to keep tabs on the Docker blog to know when the next DockerCon is on!
Apiumhub
Apiumhub tech blog supplies best practices and tips related to their specialization–namely, software architecture, web development, and mobile app development. They provide quite long blog posts alongside the required code snippets and images. And. quite contrastingly, Apiumhub is one dev blog that seems to post according to a strict timetable. Mark the dates on your calendar! Because, apart from some additional blog posts published on another day, you can certainly expect 2 posts from Apiumhub each week, exactly on Tuesdays & Thursdays.
web.dev
web.dev blog centers on… you guessed it! web development. This is a dev blog run by Google which posts blog content applicable to multiple web-related technologies including both the front-end & back-end. Also, web.dev provides you with learning material, the latest web tech trends, and Google updates possibly useful for you as a web developer. Additionally, a web.dev podcast lets you listen in on Google Developers giving their insights, guides, and tips on web development.
The blog doesn’t post according to a preset schedule; hence, you can expect weeks with a single post and also weeks with close to ten blog posts. Based on the last 10 weeks (starting from the time of writing), we observed an average of about 4 posts/week.
SitePoint
SitePoint is a quite popular dev blog that’s been around since 1999. They explore a vast range of topics–from common ones like front-end back-end development & design, all the way to trendy topics as “entrepreneur” and “WordPress”. As a quite verbose platform, they have a pretty active community you could involve with. Furthermore, if you sign up as a premium user, SitePoint would additionally add their own collection of books, courses, and tech talks into the bargain! Their blogs usually happen to be quite long & detailed with code snippets and images; plus, you can safely expect around 4 of them per week.
JavaScript Weekly
This is essentially an email newsletter-focused dev blog published weekly on Fridays. JavaScript Weekly doesn’t issue its own blog posts; instead, it curates a list of JavaScript-related posts from various other dev blogs and sends it to subscribed users. Particularly, these curations share a common template–a top section containing the featured posts followed by some JavaScript tips & releases, a section displaying a few job vacancies, a few more “Articles, Opinions & Tutorials” concluding with a “Code & Tools” section. List interface on both emails and the web is quite basic; but noteworthily, their homepage displays a pretty catchy mobile-emulator-like interface to browse its curation.
Frontend Weekly
Frontend Weekly is a newsletter-focused dev blog weekly delivered to its subscribers. Accordingly, this newsletter curates external Front-end-related blog posts into a list and sends it right to your email each Wednesday. Their list usually contains posts about front-end libraries, links to front-end learning material, and a video.
Hacker Noon
Hacker Noon is a dev blog that covers stories on various tech-related content. Their posts fall under the main topics of “Tech”, “Software”, “Decentralization”, each holding about a dozen tag-based subtopics. Hacker Noon is a quite active blog publishing about 2-3 posts per hour in a catchy digital-like interface. And, they haven’t forgotten to serve a podcast as well for us avid developers!
Hacker News
Hacker News is a computer science and entrepreneurship-focused blog that lets users post stories that other users can vote and comment on. This dev blog has one minimalistic ordered-list-like interface kept active thanks to its users sharing about one to two posts every hour.
Habr
Habr is a Russian dev blog founded in 2006 which launched its English language counterpart starting from 2019. Their content comes under main topics of “Development”, “Administrating”, “Design”, “Management”, “Marketing”, “PopSci” which Habr users can contribute posts on. Users can publish posts along with code snippets and/or images and as we observed, Habr receives 1 or 2 posts per day but there can be days with no posts at all.
Lokalise
Lokalise is a localization/internationalization management platform that complementarily hosts a conclusive dev blog. This Lokalise blog publishes localization-related business guides, insights, product updates, and an insider’s view of the Lokalise platform. Alongside, the blog also publishes step-by-step tutorials for internationalizing/localizing on various programming languages/libraries. You can read about 3 to 4 localization-related blog articles each week on this Lokalise blog.
