CSCI E-168

Four students have asked me what blogs/feeds I read, so I suppose I should answer the question, since there are probably more people who are curious but not inclined to arouse my vanity by asking such a question.

Here are a few notes on how I leverage feed reading personally and professionally.

First off, the beauty part of a feed in my humble opinion is that it comes to your via your reader in a uniform format; so I don’t have to be distracted by the idiosyncratic layout or ads on a random blog. I do appreciate good-looking blogs, but when I’m in my reader, I’m consuming information rapidly. Indeed, I’m frequently sifting it. I really don’t have time to read a lot of info from the web; indeed, I find it rather counter-productive. But for competitive reasons I need to stay on top of certain things. Here’s a list; first work, then personal. The links are to the blogs, you can find the feeds yourself. I’ll save Ruby/Rails and engineering feeds for a later time.

Work

1. I subscribe to all of the blogs of our direct and semi-direct competitors, and all of the blogs of the developers in those companies. I have learned some amazing things this way — I’ve known about layoffs before the employees of our competitors in some cases. I also know a lot about their software and hardware infrastructures, and about their development strategies. So I know who’s doing a great job executing technically, and who’s blowing it, which can be very helpful when we think about partnering or exposing our web services to another company. If you pursue this strategy, note that sometimes the profiles of people on social networking sites expose a feed, so if their employment status changes, you can monitor it.

2. I subscribe to the blogs of pundits in our marketplace. I won’t mention most of them by name because they don’t need to know how interested I am in what they say, but I will say that Cheezhead is great.

3. I subscribe to a key few excellent blogs regarding high tech business in general. The best for me are Xconomy (local news regarding Kendall Square and greater Boston), GigaOM, John Battelle’s blog, and Rough Type, Nicholas Carr’s blog.

4. I subscribe to a lot of alerts regarding system uptime and platform changes. For example, TextDrive has a feed about system reboots, and Facebook has a feed about their frequent and embarrassing disruptions in service. These are worth searching out if you depend on any services.

5. I subscribe to a lot of engineering feeds; more about that in a later post. As it happens, it rarely occurs that I read something technical that has immediate impact on software development in the company; usually consequential changes there build up after a lot of reading and thinking.

6. I subscribe to a few feeds regarding venture capital. A mixed bag. Because everyone wants their money, many of the VC bloggers know they have an audience and will blog about the most inane things.

Personal

Here I’m just going to list some of my all-time favorite feeds/blogs.

10. Rands in Repose. This is one of the greatest project management blogs, ever. The posts are long but fascinating. Here’s a recent one regarding job interviews. The author has compiled his bests posts into a book.

9. Scott Burns is a personal finance columnist for the Dallas Morning News who is oriented around numbers. He’s carried in the Globe. What makes him a little different is that he co-wrote an important book with an economist on how demographic changes affect debt, the value of the dollar, and inflation, the Coming Generation Storm.

8. xkcd. This is the blog with the famous “sudo make me a sandwich” cartoon.

7. A feed from the Washington Post that tells me how my congressman has been voting. This is actually quite tedious because it is loaded with reports on, e.g., “Expressing Sympathy and Support for the People and Governments of the Countries of Central America, the Caribbean, and Mexico Which Have Suffered From Hurricanes Felix, Dean, and Henriette and Whose Complete Economic and Fatality Toll Are Still Unknown” (I don’t mean to diminish this gesture, but it seems to be on a different level from a vote regarding policy). Frankly I should stop subscribing to this because I always know how he’s going to vote; but if you have a rep who needs monitoring, this is useful.

6. Steve Yegge’s blog. Always interesting. Long posts. You have to control for his spin. Like Rands, a matter of recent interest for him is strategizing the job market. Wonder what’s going on with these guys? Anyway, I read him for the tech commentary, not for the biz.

5. Collision Detection, the blog of Clive Thompson, who writes frequently for Wired and the New York Times. His speciality is reporting on unusual or provocative recent scientific findings. He also writes on computer games; his best stuff in this regard are his pieces on so-called “casual” games.

4. The Cambridge Chronicle. I think they must cherry-pick articles for their feed, because a lot of the posts are about people getting shot in the butt, loud parrots, and stuff from the police blotter, an alarming amount of which happens within a three block radius of where I live. My town.

3. Bug Bash. Cartoons about, um, product development? Teamwork? I don’t know, but it’s all too true. Maybe this should be in the “work” category.

2. Crud Crud. I subscribe to a lot of music feeds, most of them awful. I need to unsubscribe to most. But a good one is the Crud Crud blog of Steve Soriano, who reports on oddities in his expansive collection of dusty singles (7″ vinyl records). He also rips from the vinyl, so the MP3s he puts up are really quite rare and hard to come by. Caution: Edgy.

1. Google Sightseeing. People report on strange things they’ve identified in Google Maps; or things of historical or engineering note, such as this recent one. This may well be my favorite feed of them all, and it’s first on my list in my reader.