An important way that I stay up on top of news that is important to me is through RSS feeds. RSS is old school tech that has been around since 1999. It’s an open standard that almost every blog and news site supports. I subscribe to a variety of professional news outlets, blog aggregators and individual bloggers.
There are a bunch of different RSS feed readers out there. Two of the big ones I’ve used are Newsblur and Feedly. They both let you browse sources to follow or add your own. I currently pay for Newsblur which though not as pretty as Feedly is more functional for my use case.
I group the blogs I follow by category. The main categories I have are:
- Design
- Finance
- Food
- Life
- Music
- Personal
- Science & Technology
- Software
- Software Leadership
If you are looking for some blogs to start following here are some of my recommendations:
- Derek Sivers: eclectic blog with entrepreneurship, tech, productivity and other random musings.
- Brandur: engineer at Stripe who does some great technical deep dives into Postgres, distributed systems, websockets and more.
- Julia Evans: a tech blog with a mix of technical tips, comics, career tips and more. Example great post: Get your work recognized: write a brag document
- Signal v. Noise: blog about company culture, tech, remote work, managing etc. Started by the people behind Basecamp
- Kalzumeus: Finance, banking, tech and entrepreneurship.
- Hayley E. Frerichs: not a tech blog but a dear friend of mine who writes fun zero waste tips and has creative bullet journals I drool over.
Any blog recommendations for me?