7 Best Engineering Newsletters (Every CTO Should Read)
Newsletters are a thing now.
There are many engineering-focused newsletters out there, but only a few are worth your time. That’s why we picked 6 — that are definitely worth it.
We asked everyone who is a fan of newsletters here at Better Stack, fellow engineering friends, and also did a proper internet sweep to find the creme-de-la-creme of engineering newsletters.
Here is the final list:
- Hacking Scale
- Refactoring
- The Pragmatic engineer
- Software Lead Weekly
- Irrational Exuberance
- Leadership in Tech
- Early-stage Startup Engineering
1. Hacking Scale
Topics: Scaling systems, Observability
Owner: Richard Oliver Bray
Subscribe on: Substack
Frequency: bi-Weekly
Focused on breaking down popular engineering posts from companies like OpenAI, AirBnb, and Instagram. Primarily focused on scaling hacks and how teams managed to grow services into crazy sizes.
Written by engineers at Better Stack, it's a great read for anyone looking for a quick and easy-to-understand overview of what big engineering teams are doing without needing to spend hours understanding all the complexity behind each decision.
Popular articles to explore: - How OpenAI Scaled Kubernetes to 7,500 Nodes
2. Refactoring
Topics: Engineering management, project management
Owner: Luca Rossi
Subscribe on: Substack
Frequency: Weekly
Written by Luca Rossi, an ex-co-founder & CTO at Italian VC-backed startup Wanderio (Skyscanner competitor). It focuses on helping tech leaders build the right processes, meet deadlines, and manage engineering teams while growing personally.
It’s an essay-style newsletter with plenty of original illustrations that make it easy to visualize any complex process. A great read for all CTOs and engineering managers who want battle-tested guidance on how to lead engineering teams towards success. And not burn out in the process.
Popular articles to explore:
3. The Pragmatic Engineer
Topics: Companies inside information, trending tech companies news
Owner: Gergely Orosz
Subscribe on: Substack
Frequency: Weekly
The #1 technology newsletter on Substack with over 500k+ subscribers. Written by engineering manager and software engineer Gergely Orosz who was previously at Skype/Microsoft, Skyscanner, and Uber.
It’s an all-around knowledge-packed publication. From best advice on salary research and stories from big software companies to the analysis of current incidents and news moving the tech world.
Popular articles to explore:
- Inside Datadog’s $5M Outage (Real-World Engineering Challenges #9)
- How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum
- Inside Uber’s move to the Cloud
4. Software Lead Weekly
Topics: From engineering to people management
Owner: Oren Ellenbogen
Subscribe on: Website
Frequency: Weekly
Published by a current VP of Engineering at Forter: Oren Ellenbogen. Previously at Commerce Sciences (acquired by Taboola), Mercury (acquired by HP), and the Israeli Air Force.
Oren offers a great summary-style newsletter, finding a great balance of technical and “peopleware” topics as well as trending tweets. Surely a great fit for anyone looking to grow as a professional manager without losing touch with what is happening in the space.
Check out past issues:
5. Irrational Exuberance
Topics: Engineering management, Personal management
Owner: Will Larson
Subscribe on: Website
Frequency: bi-Weekly (usually)
One of the best newsletters for tech leaders looking to learn from large engineering teams. Will Larson is CTO at Carta and has been a software engineering leader at Calm, Stripe, and Uber.
He has many unique learnings for CTOs moving from technical to managerial responsibilities. His writing style is mostly long-form deep dives. But it’s well-worth it.
Popular issues to explore:
6. Leadership in Tech
Topics: Everything engineering-related
Owner: Jakub Chodounsky
Subscribe on: Website
Frequency: Weekly
The second summary-style newsletter that made the list. Made by Jakub Chodounsky, the CTO of Hatch. It’s a gem finder of new tech-related articles from niche blogs & newsletters to LinkedIn and Twitter posts.
With over five articles in each issue, you’ll always find at least one right up your alley.
Popular issues to explore:
7. Early-stage Startup Engineering
Topics: Startup engineering & management
Owner: Juraj Masar
Subscribe on: Substack
Frequency: bi-Weekly (usually)
Yes, this one is a little bit of self-promo, so don’t take our word for it. Read it and see for yourself!
Written by the CEO & Co-founder of Better Stack, ex-VP of engineering at Represent, and two times exited founder. Juraj writes about his learnings from early-stage companies, focusing on common engineering challenges, pitfalls, and ways of preventing them.
It’s a quick-takes style newsletter with 3-5 minute reads. Ideal for any technical co-founder or CTO who wants to ship fast and build a great engineering team.
Popular issues to explore:
- 100x Software Engineering
- Quick and Dirty vs. Polished and Perfect: The Two Sides of Engineering
- Management 101: Giving Feedback
Bonus: the Weekly series (for staying technical in a managerial role)
Want to stay on top of new tech insights and hacker news is not for you? Then definitely check out the weekly series. A quick summary-style newsletter linking to the most interesting tech articles and tutorials across the internet:
- Javascript Weekly
- Frontend Focus
- Ruby Weekly
- Node Weekly
- Golang Weekly
- React Status
- Serverless Status
- Postgres Weekly
Final thoughts
Hope you liked this selection of the best engineering newsletters. Did we miss out on any cool engineering newsletters? Please drop me a line at community@betterstack.com — we always love looking at new things in the space!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Make your mark
Join the writer's program
Are you a developer and love writing and sharing your knowledge with the world? Join our guest writing program and get paid for writing amazing technical guides. We'll get them to the right readers that will appreciate them.
Write for us
Build on top of Better Stack
Write a script, app or project on top of Better Stack and share it with the world. Make a public repository and share it with us at our email.
community@betterstack.comor submit a pull request and help us build better products for everyone.
See the full list of amazing projects on github