Web reading list

These are my favorite sites and authors on the web. There's a definite bias towards technology and biking topics.

Within each section, the links are roughly ranked in order of most influential to least.

News

• Hacker News aggregates articles about technology and often hosts thoughtful commentary on them.

• Lobste.rs is similar to Hacker News, but smaller and more personal.

• Legible News publishes a daily report on a few important news items in plain text and without ads.

• The New Yorker has the space and time to dive into the details of news stories.

• Heather Cox Richardson provides baseline historical context for current events.

Gardeners

These sites don't follow the typical structure of a stream of articles, but instead curate a wiki-like set of pages, like my website. I can't follow along with their updates because they don't have an RSS feed, so I occasionally check back in with them to see what's changed.

• Andy Matuschak inspired me to start structured note-taking in 2020. He writes about technology to enhance learning and human cognition.

• Simplifier documents chemistry and homemade manufacturing processes. The unnamed author strips away the complexities of the modern industrial toolchain to find materials and processes that are simple to produce.

• 100 Rabbits are a couple who live out of a sailboat and build low-cost/low-footprint creative computing software and art. Their website documents their ocean voyages, vegan recipes, and technology they use.

• Gwern Branwen maintains a formidable website about nootropics, computer security, and web technology.

• Thomasaurus collects straightforward information about writing websites and the author's projects.

• Azlen Elza writes in the same format as Matuschak and is also covering tools for thought.

• Alexey Guzey works to build a more effective and fair path for science researchers, while writing about productivity and intelligence.

• Paul Bourke has been explaining graphics algorithms for decades.

• Ben Lynn is a programming language design practitioner but also discusses other computer science topics.

• Maggie Appleton is an illustrator who distills meta-knowledge ideas into colorful art.

Bloggers

These sites publish updates periodically and make it easy to keep up-to-date with them using an RSS feed and a client like NetNewsWire.

Thinkers

The following sites showcase the opinions and research of a single individual on a wide range of topics.

• Astral Codex Ten is the continuation of the legendary psychology and science blog and a hub for the rationalist community. Scott Alexander writes about medicine (primarily mental health), current events, social movements, morality, and takes positions on arbitrary pop culture science or technology trends. There's some noise in the feed if you're not interested in comment threads, polls, or other minutiae, but the long-form articles are insightful and well-researched.

• Robin Sloan is an author and olive oil maker based in Emeryville, CA. His intermittent newsletter is exceptionally well-written and full of wit and interesting links.

• Alex Kladov (a.k.a. matklad) writes about programming languages like Rust and Zig and their tools.

• Ben Kuhn writes about productivity, engineering, and knowledge work.

• Tom MacWright is a programmer who writes about urban life and his work on geographical information systems.

• Tom Critchlow also has a wiki and discusses how to write and develop ideas on the web.

• Matt Webb is setting up a new research lab and "speculates on the future of technology, design, and society."

• Devon Zuegel is interested in urban design, computer history, ethics, and impact, but only blogs rarely.

• Derek Sivers is a retired founder who writes about how to live a fulfilling life.

• Gordon Brander is another technologist interested in tools for thought, trying to simplify and empower knowledge accretion.

• Evan Hahn is a former classmate who shares engineering advice and thoughtful takes on the technology industry.

• Steve Yegge (previously on Blogspot) is a now-retired corporate programmer who wrote about the pragmatic aspects of programming.

Commentators

These authors tend to comment on current events or culture and offer an interesting, well-reasoned perspective, even if I may disagree with them.

• Daring Fireball by John Gruber has been providing technology news commentary for almost two decades with insightful and mostly optimistic views.

• Pixel Envy by Nick Heer is another technology news commentary site with less enthusiasm but more technical detail than Daring Fireball.

• Marco Arment infrequently gives his perspective as the developer of a popular podcast app, Overcast.

• Michael Tsai offers a more critical look at software and technology announcements.

• Thorsten Ball comments on programming and LLM articles in his weekly newsletter Register Spill.

• Grumpy Website and Sorry About Computer are a steady stream of problematic computer experiences.

• Drew DeVault builds development infrastructure that abhors commercialization and often skewers what others would call progress.

• Nikita Tonsky gives critical takes on software and design.

• Computers Are Bad recalls computer history and how many design decisions were historical accidents.

• uses this asks engineers and designers what hardware and software they use.

• Tim Bray is semi-retired technology director who often has interesting context on technology news.

• Martin Tournoij discusses empathy and a more balanced reaction to technology news.

• Riccardo Mori catalogues his experiences dealing with buggy software.

Builders

These people primarily talk about the work product they share with the world, like some of the gardeners, but in a serialized format.

• Louie Mantia is a graphic designer living in Japan who frequently shares excellent icons and wallpapers.

• Mitchell Hashimoto is a semi-retired startup founder who works on a fast, full-featured terminal emulator in his spare time.

Explainers

The theme for these sites is breaking down a complex topic into better understood pieces.

• Tristan Hume explains his approach to understanding computers and building systems.

• Russ Cox writes about design proposals for the Go programming language.

• Dan Luu challenges software engineering preconceptions.

• Jeff Kaufman writes thoughtful notes about parenting, frugality, and effective altruism.

• Brandur Leach writes about computer databases with charming diagrams that were made with The Monodraw diagram editor.

• Diomidis Spinellis is a polymath computer scientist with articles on computer history and debugging.

• Bartosz Ciechanowski writes long articles with interactive elements about physics and engineering.

• Julia Evans breaks down complex software into easy-to-digest pieces.

• Andrew Healey writes short articles about programming challenges he's worked on, like detecting embroidery thread colors and building a chess engine.

• lord writes about text editing and data manipulation in user applications.

• fasterthanlime dives into Rust programs with long articles that discuss every detail of their implementation.

• Low Tech Magazine writes about compromises we may need to make to prevent catastrophic climate change.

• Ben Congdon is a baker and avid reader who also works with pen plotters.

• R. Tyler Croy has good ideas about putting computers to useful purpose and Rust tips.

• Neven Mrgan, a designer at Panic, is compiling a list of baking recipes.

• Laurence Tratt is a researcher who discusses language design, performance, and the mechanics of research.

• Evan Travers writes about programming tools and workflows.

• Nicole Tietz gives great advice about software engineering.

• Cliff L. Biffle is a low-level Rust programmer who explains how to organize programs for safety and comprehension.

• Fabien Sanglard is a game developer who explains how classic games like Doom were implemented.

• Bob Nystrom wrote two books about building usually-daunting programs from scratch and infrequently posts on his blog.

• Simon Willison writes about LLMs and his experiences using them.

• Phil Eaton explains varied programming projects like interpreters and database interfaces.

• Nikita Popov describes how programming languages are implemented with a focus on LLVM and PHP.

• Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert writes about just-in-time compilation and programming language design.

• Jamie Brandon is a prolific programming language designer and writes articles about databases and new programming languages.

• In The Know Cycling reviews bike equipment scientifically and explains the criteria used to rank products.

• Admiral Cloudberg reports on airplane accidents: a grim subject that describes failures of government regulation, engineering design, manufacturing, and plane operators.

• Fatih Arslan posts about his experiences with expensive gear and occasionally features of the Go programming language.

Software performance

My day job revolves around performance analysis and software optimization, so I have a professional interest here.

• Performance Matters by Travis Downs dives deep into why computers are slowed down and it's often due to abstractions that don't fit well in the expectations of modern computers.

• Nelson Elhage has written articles about parsing and database performance, and how software workloads interact with hardware.

• Brendan Gregg writes about his investigations with Linux observability tools.

• Random ASCII by Bruce Dawson demonstrates performance analysis techniques on the Windows operating system.

• Andrey Akinshin invents new and exotic statistical methods to make sense of performance measurements.

• Raph Levien designs new computer graphics primitives and user interface frameworks in Rust.

Transportation

These sites keep me informed of enduring cycling wisdom or the slow progress towards a safer urban transportation environment.

• Bike Portland is a news site for the Portland bicycle advocacy community.

• Rivendell Bicycle Works is a monthly source of bicycle industry counter-culture and reality checks that stand in contrast to the industry's fascination with problem-seeking bicycle gear.

• Caltrain HSR Compatibility Blog provides informed context on actions taken by the San Francisco Bay Area's commuter train operator to prepare for integration with high speed rail to Los Angeles.

• Green Caltrain is a broad commentary on how Caltrain fits into the Bay Area's transportation network.

• Pedestrian Observations catalogues poor transportation planning around the United States, primarily focusing on New York City.