A curated list of the people, blogs, conference platforms and channels worth following in 2026. Be kind to report any broken links…
Most Frequent Visits
- Gmail – email
- AppFigures – app store analytics
Tech Influencers & Personal Blogs
- Andrej Karpathy – ex-OpenAI/Tesla AI lead; deep explainer posts on how LLMs actually work
- Simon Willison – Django co-creator; the best day-by-day chronicle of what LLMs can and cannot do
- Armin Ronacher – creator of Flask; long-form on Python, Rust and agentic coding
- Martin Fowler – the classic reference on software architecture, refactoring and agile
- Dan Abramov – React core team alum; unusually deep dives into JavaScript and React internals
- Addy Osmani – Chrome engineering lead; web performance, AI-assisted engineering workflows
- Julia Evans – debugging stories, zines and the internals of networking/git/DNS made fun
- swyx – coined “AI Engineer”; Latent Space podcast and AI engineering essays
- Thorsten Ball – source-level writing on programming languages and coding agents
- Aphyr (Kyle Kingsbury) – Jepsen creator; legendary distributed-systems fault-injection teardowns
- Brendan Gregg – performance engineering, flame graphs, systems observability
- Lex Fridman – long-form interviews with researchers, engineers and founders
- Kent Beck – Extreme Programming inventor; writing on software design and “tidy first” thinking
Company Engineering Blogs
- Netflix TechBlog – microservices, chaos engineering, streaming at scale
- Meta Engineering – infrastructure and AI systems behind Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp
- Google Developers Blog – Android, Chrome, Firebase, Gemini developer news
- Uber Engineering – marketplace, maps, realtime systems at massive scale
- Stripe Blog – payments infrastructure, API design and developer experience
- Shopify Engineering – Ruby/Rails and monolith-scaling war stories
- GitHub Blog – Octoverse, Copilot and the state of the developer ecosystem
- LinkedIn Engineering – data infrastructure, ML feeds, JVM-scale systems
- Spotify Engineering – backend, data and audio streaming engineering culture
- Slack Engineering – realtime messaging infrastructure and performance work
- Cloudflare Blog – edge networking, security and the deepest post-mortems on the internet
- Microsoft DevBlogs – .NET, VS Code, Azure, Windows – official product team blogs
- Dropbox Tech – sync engines, storage and ML infrastructure
- Discord Blog – Elixir/Rust realtime infrastructure at hundreds of millions of users
- Airbnb Tech Blog – service-oriented architecture, ML platform, design systems
- Vercel Blog – frontend infrastructure, Next.js and the AI-native web stack
- Anthropic Engineering – practical guidance on building with Claude and agents
- OpenAI News – model releases, research publications and system cards
- Hugging Face Blog – open-source ML, transformers, local inference
- AWS Architecture Blog – cloud architecture patterns and well-architected guidance
Conference Platforms & Talk Archives
- InfoQ – the reference news + recorded-talks site for senior software engineers
- GOTO (gotopia.tech) – GOTO conference talks, podcasts and masterclasses
- NDC Conferences – Oslo/London/Porto developer conferences; most talks free online
- NDC on YouTube – full NDC talk recordings, consistently excellent
- Devoxx – Belgium/Poland/France community conferences, JVM and beyond
- CppCon on YouTube – the C++ conference; talks are free and canonical
- PyCon US – the Python community conference
- KubeCon + CloudNativeCon – the cloud-native / Kubernetes flagship
- FOSDEM – the free, totally unfiltered open-source developer conference, Brussels
- QCon – senior software-engineering conferences for practitioners
- dev.events – calendar of developer conferences worldwide, filterable by topic
Academic-Style & Research Blogs
- Google Research – publications and deep dives from Google Research
- Google DeepMind Blog – AlphaFold, Gemini and frontier research announcements
- Anthropic Research – interpretability, alignment and model research papers
- Microsoft Research – one of the largest CS research organizations in the world
- arXiv cs – preprints in computer science; where papers land first
- ACM Queue – practitioner-oriented essays on hard systems problems; superb
- Communications of the ACM – the flagship CS magazine, now fully open access
- Distill – archived but gold-standard interactive ML explainer articles
- Papers We Love – community built around reading classic CS papers; talks + repo
- Hugging Face Daily Papers – community-upvoted daily AI paper feed
YouTube Channels
- Fireship – fast, opinionated takes on the modern dev landscape
- ThePrimeTime – ThePrimeagen – backend dev culture, Vim and live reactions
- Theo – t3.gg – TypeScript, AI tooling and the frontend ecosystem
- ByteByteGo – system design explained visually
- Hussein Nasser – backend internals, protocols and databases
- Two Minute Papers – research papers made genuinely exciting
- Computerphile – computer science concepts explained by academics
- freeCodeCamp – full-length free courses on virtually every stack
- Gaurav Sen – system design and interview prep
- Jon Gjengset – deep Rust and systems “decoding” streams
- MIT OpenCourseWare – real MIT lectures – algorithms, AI, systems
People on X
- @karpathy – Andrej Karpathy – AI education and model internals
- @simonw – Simon Willison – LLM practice, tips and tooling
- @swyx – swyx – AI engineering maps and Latent Space
- @fchollet – François Chollet – Keras and ARC-AGI creator; reasoning benchmark debates
- @rasbt – Sebastian Raschka – readable breakdowns of new LLM papers
- @DrJimFan – Jim Fan – NVIDIA robotics and embodied agents
- @jeremyphoward – Jeremy Howard – fast.ai; practical deep learning
- @mitsuhiko – Armin Ronacher – agentic coding in practice
- @theo – Theo Browne – dev tooling, TypeScript, AI stack takes
- @steipete – Peter Steinberger – agentic coding harnesses
- @natolambert – Nathan Lambert – RLHF, post-training, open-model policy
- @emollick – Ethan Mollick – Wharton professor; using AI for real work
- @AndrewYNg – Andrew Ng – AI education and policy
- @ylecun – Yann LeCun – Turing laureate; contrarian research takes
- @sama – Sam Altman – OpenAI CEO; product news first
- @demishassabis – Demis Hassabis – Nobel laureate, Google DeepMind
- @levelsio – Pieter Levels – indie hacking and shipping with AI
Newsletters & Communities
- Hacker News – the default front page of software engineering
- Lobsters – calmer, higher-signal link aggregator for developers
- TLDR – 5-minute daily tech newsletter; huge and free
- The Pragmatic Engineer – Gergely Orosz; engineering careers and industry internals
- Pointer.io – weekly reading list for senior engineers and tech leads
- JavaScript Weekly – the long-running weekly JS digest
- Python Weekly – weekly Python news and articles
- Changelog – open-source podcasts and news
- Ars Technica – deep, technically literate tech journalism
Last updated: October 2026.