In today's world of information overflow how as a developer do you keep up with all that's going on in this rapidly developing community? Well, it's difficult, but you can conquer it just by being a little bit more organized.
First of all if you aren't using an RSS Feed Reader these days then forget about it - it is the most efficient way to scan and read multiple websites. Now there are plenty of readers available these days, google has one, outlook has one, but I'm still using SharpReader as my feed reader, it's been around a while but I've always liked its features and it's simplicity.
I've probably got around one hundred feeds that I subscribe to which is way too many, so I thought I'd do some culling and try to bring it down to ten feeds that I couldn't do without.
So here are my top ten feeds...
- Reflective Perspective (The Morning Brew) I always start my day with this great link blog which has kept me well informed on all things developer related (with perhaps more of a Microsoft slant). Ever since Mike Gunderloy moved to the Ruby world and stopped writing The Daily Grind I was slightly devastated, but Chris Alcock's morning brew has filled the void. My backup linkblog which is also top notch is Arjan's World , and if they both go down then I'll also have A Continuous Learner's Weblog just in case. If you were just to read these three feeds then you'd be a very well informed developer (well, .Net developer anyways).
- I've been following Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen for quite some time and it is by far the best coder blog out there with great insights, code examples, technology reviews, and generally just well written articles. When Scott H got assimilated into Microsoft I noticed more and more references to his alter ego Scott Guthrie (who's actually his boss). I would include Scott Gu's blog in my top ten except Scott H always covers anything "the Gu" writes.
- Coding Horror by Jeff Attwood ... always finds something controversial to write about and has no trouble expressing his opinions. Very well written articles and great content, more focused on developer psyche and philosophy than hard core coding examples.
- 37 Signals - The main guy here, David Hansson, founded Ruby on Rails and has some great insight into web usability and design.
- XKCD - To be honest, when I first found this site I spent some considerable amount of time reading through all the comics and really laughed my arse off. I admit now that I am addicted to these comics and I eagerly await each one which generally get published like clockwork three times a week.
- StackOverflow is my newest favorite weekly podcast staring Joel Spolsky and Jeff Attwood. Another top podcast is HanselMinutes , which I do listen to every week but I include it in my top ten under Computer Zen ;-)
- InfoQ has great articles, pdf booklets, video interviews, on all things agile, architecture, .Net, Java, and more. A very good site which was a step up from the comparable site The Server Side .
- Code Better blog is produced by a group of bloggers , some more controversial than others, ... a while back a group of the bloggers splintered off from CodeBetter and formed The Runtime - which seems to be struggling in comparison.
- High Scalability - fantastic reading about architecture of some of the big websites out there, the tools they use, and lessons learnt from scaling. A must read for any serious web developer/architect.
- Slashdot - the original geek blog, it may not still be the best but it has to be in my top ten for nostalgic reasons.
I guarantee you that if you read and keep up with all these blogs/podcasts then you will evolve into a gun kick-ass guru developer with an attitude ;-)
Some other highly recommended feeds that didn't make it to my top ten...