The 15 Best Engineering Blogs that every CTO Should Read

There’s no shortage of helpful information in the engineering world. The issue with that, though, is where to find the good stuff.

Almost naturally nowadays, people in general jump to newsletters or podcasts, but forget about the good old-fashioned blog.

There are tons of engineering blogs out there, but they’re not all created equal. To save you some effort, we’ve asked around the office here at Better Stack to gather a list of our favorites.

Here is the final list:

1. Better Stack Community
2. Netflix TechBlog
3. LinkedIn Engineering
4. Amazon Web Services Blog
5. Slack Engineering
6. Engineering at Meta
7. Spotify Engineering
8. GitHub Engineering
9. Microsoft Engineering Blog
10. OpenAI Blog
11. Medium Engineering
12. Stack Overflow Blog
13. Quora Engineering Blog
14. Reddit Engineering Blog
15. Heroku Engineering Blog

The 15 Best Engineering Blogs of 2024

1. Better Stack Community

Year founded: 2021

Monthly readers: 224k

Upload frequency: Weekly

Subscribe on: betterstack.com/community/

Better Stack hasn’t been around as long as some of the others on this list, but we’ve been fortunate enough to collaborate with some incredible minds who’ve created equally incredible content.

The Better Stack Community is a collection of helpful guides, Q&As, comparisons, and other blog posts that have been written by experts in their respective fields. We cover topics that revolve around scaling apps in production, observability, DevOps, and more.

The blog is divided into 5 parts: Community, guides, questions, comparisons, and the general blog. Each of these sections has its own topics and tones. For example, the guides are designed to be in-depth walkthroughs on topics like debugging Node.js apps or using SQL databases in Go.

The questions are designed to answer some of development's most frequently asked questions, and even have questions and answers about Better Stack's products. The comparisons section goes into detail with comparing alternatives to specific monitoring tools.

Finally, the blog section is a general section that covers engineering topics and the approach that we take to engineering here at Better Stack. It has several articles that are related to engineering, like this one.

What’s great about all of this content is that it’s an expression of expert minds from all walks of life, industries, and locations around the globe. It’s not just a blog, it’s a community.

Interesting reads

• Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes: A Practical Comparison
• Log Formatting in Production: 9 Best Practices
• Docker Security: 14 Best Practices You Should Know

2. Netflix TechBlog

Year founded: 2010

Monthly readers: 345.4k

Upload frequency: Bi-weekly

Followers/subscribers on Medium: 403k

Subscribe on: netflixtechblog.com/

Nowadays, we all sort of look at Netflix as a normal part of our daily routine. The truth is that Netflix was such a technological advancement for its time that a lot of engineers look to it for inspiration daily, which is why Netflix's TechBlog is a must-read.

The articles themselves aren't organized into any categories, and they're hosted on Medium, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of incredible resources. It's really like a battle log of all the processes, fixes, and optimizations they have had to implement to keep Netflix running smoothly for the 260+ million monthly users.

Very few platforms have the opportunity to display and discuss data at the scale that Netflix does. They go through the nitty-gritty details that took them from step A to step Z when implementing new Netflix features like dynamically optimized HDR video streaming, speech detection in music and audio content, and in-video search.

Interesting reads

• Embracing Neurodiversity Within Information Security
• Kubernetes And Kernel Panics
• Discovering Creative Insights in Promotional Artwork

3. LinkedIn Engineering

Year founded: 2011

Monthly readers: 11k

Upload frequency: Weekly

Subscribe on: linkedin.com/blog/engineering

LinkedIn's Engineering Blog is broken down into 3 main sections: Data, AI, and infrastructure. The data and infrastructure sections are packed full of experiences from LinkedIn's very own engineers. They talk about the war stories that come with handling over 4 trillion events daily, supporting 1 billion users, with interesting deep-dives in optimizing Kafka, Pinot, and Rest.li, Gobblin, and other tools. The AI section focuses heavily on building reliable and responsible AI and LLM optimizations.

For those looking to swap careers (or maybe just need a little motivational boost), LinkedIn also has a section dedicated to career stories. There, you'll find a little less technical content like musicians making career swaps to data scientists mid-pandemic.

Interesting reads

• Why 2024 is the time to rewrite your engineering playbook
• Extracting skills from content to fuel the LinkedIn Skills Graph
• Reducing Apache Spark Application Dependencies Upload by 99%

4. Amazon Web Services Blog

Year founded: 2004

Monthly readers: 238k

Upload frequency: Daily

Subscribe on: aws.amazon.com/blogs/

The AWS blog has a lot to offer. It primarily focuses on AWS-related topics, but since AWS is one of the biggest platforms on the planet, it's quite a bit of content. 42 individual subcategories, to be exact, each one of them with their little tidbit of knowledge.

To be perfectly fair, it is extremely overwhelming to look at this blog, and they know that. This is why the blog functions as a forum-style page that allows you to simply check boxes to filter through the treasure trove of content.

So what can you expect? Anything from Alexa engineering to front-end, HPC to VR/AR, media services to open source, and so much more. Into game development? They cover that, too. Blockchain? It's there. The AWS blog covers anything and everything to do with engineering in AWS.

Interesting reads

• Transforming education globally through generative AI: Insights from AWS executive Valerie Singer
• How BigBasket improved AI-enabled checkout at their physical stores using Amazon SageMaker
• Ingest and analyze equipment data in the cloud

5. Slack Engineering

Year founded: 2016

Monthly readers: 88k

Upload frequency: Monthly

Subscribe on: slack.engineering/

Slack is huge. They cater to hundreds of thousands of organizations around the globe daily. This sort of influence means big advancements in the world of engineering, and they go into detail on their blog on exactly how they manage to keep up. They give first-hand accounts on things like swapping to AWS IMDSv2 and cellular architecture.

What's particularly nice about Slack's Engineering Blog is that it's very conversational, which we can all appreciate. They treat each article as if it were a story, which not every blog can do, at least not correctly. It certainly makes reading topics like building custom animations in the Workflow Builder a lot more enjoyable.

Slack also uses its engineering blog to make announcements for its products. So it's a good read if you're using Slack and an engineer. But overall, it’s a great place where real experts discuss the pains and gains of engineering at Slack.

Interesting reads

• The Scary Thing About Automating Deploys
• Building Custom Animations in the Workflow Builder
• Mobile Developer Experience at Slack

6. Engineering at Meta

Year founded: 2008

Monthly readers: 877k

Upload frequency: Weekly

Subscribe on: engineering.fb.com/

Facebook (or Meta, as it's called now) is more than just a meme-sharing platform where we all go to get our daily overdose of mostly cringe content. It's also a technological marvel.

The Engineering at Meta Blog is sort of an all-encompassing blog, but it is well organized, to say the least. Since Meta owns Instagram and WhatsApp, there are a lot of experts weighing in to discuss large-scale technical challenges and trending topics in the engineering world.

The blog is broken down into 5 core groups: open-source, platforms (iOS, Android, etc.), infrastructure, and video engineering (which includes AR/VR). One of the standout categories for me was AR/VR engineering. Since Meta is one of the leaders in this tech, it's great to get first-hand accounts of some of the obstacles they've gone through to get to where they are. What's equally as impressive is their coverage of using AI in the VR space with Oculus.

To take it a step further, no matter what category you click on, Meta further breaks it down into articles, videos, and publications. Articles and videos are pretty straightforward, but the publications section takes you to Meta's research branch where you can get even more insight.

Interesting reads

• AI debugging at Meta with HawkEye
• Using short-lived certificates to protect TLS secrets
• Meta developer tools: Working at scale

7. Spotify Engineering

Year founded: 2013

Monthly readers: 100k

Upload frequency: Monthly

Subscribe on: engineering.atspotify.com/

Spotify is the world’s largest audio streaming platform and its engineering blog cuts no corners. Hosting millions of songs and enabling users to stream takes a lot of ingenuity, and they chat all about it in their blog. The math behind their extremely complex algorithm is a hot topic, but they cover a wide variety of engineering topics that will be sure to pique your interest.

Another popular topic on Spotify’s engineering blog is what they call “Wrapped”. Wrapped is Spotify’s end-of-the-year campaign that celebrates users and their unique taste in music and audio. As you can imagine, this requires a lot of engineering, as there are around half a billion active monthly users. They dive into the ins and outs of this campaign from a technical standpoint, and it’s nothing short of impressive.

Interesting reads

• The What, Why, and How of Mastering App Size
• Exploring the Animation Landscape of 2023 Wrapped
• Load Testing for 2022 Wrapped

8. GitHub Engineering

Year founded: 2008

Monthly readers: 148k

Upload frequency: Weekly

Subscribe on: github.blog/category/engineering/

The engineering portion of the GitHub blog is just a small piece of the larger blog, but it is packed with useful information on how GitHub manages its highly scalable engineering team. Many of the articles are set up as guides with built-in examples of how GitHub managed to pull off things like using merge to ship hundreds of changes every day, or how they manage to keep repository maintainer information accurate.

One of the coolest features on GitHub is its code scanning autofix. This is a feature that leverages AI to scan and suggest fixes for security vulnerabilities in user's codebases. They go into detail on how they managed to pull it off. In fact, they cover AI in engineering pretty well, particularly when it comes to optimizing LLM.

Aside from this, you'll find a lot of content on engineers' use of GitHub Copilot, which helps developers create prototypes, understand code, make UI changes, troubleshoot errors, make code more accessible, and generate unit tests.

Interesting reads

• GitHub’s Engineering Fundamentals program: How we deliver on availability, security, and accessibility
• How GitHub’s Developer Experience team improved innerloop development
• How to build a GPT-3 App with Nextjs, React, and GitHub Copilot

9. Microsoft Engineering Blog

Year founded: 2021

Monthly readers: 150k

Upload frequency: Weekly

Subscribe on: devblogs.microsoft.com/engineering-at-microsoft/

Few brands in the world have the pedigree that Microsoft does. Since its conception, it's been pushing the boundaries for engineering and tech and continues to do so daily. Since Mircosoft is invested in AI, its blog heavily focuses on content related to it (like pretty much everyone else nowadays), but it's not limited to just that.

They've divided the blog into 6 categories: Developer, technology, languages, .NET, platform development, and data development. Each section has several subsections (56 in total), so feel free to explore around. One of the sections that I appreciate the most is the language section. It's divided into content based on a specific language like C# or Typescript, and they even have a category for Java in Chinese.

What’s unique about this engineering blog is that they have a community of over 100,000 engineers contributing to it. In some cases, they have thousands of engineers on a single project. This blog showcases these engineers’ knowledge and techniques for overcoming issues and challenges like enhancing reliability in Microsoft Fabric and Azure Synapse through load testing and so much more.

Interesting reads

• Microsoft Dev Box for Microsoft engineers
• The Journey to Secure the Software Supply Chain at Microsoft
• Load testing AAD-based authentication for Azure Cache for Redis

10. OpenAI Blog

Year founded: 2015

Monthly readers: 35m+

Upload frequency: Weekly

Subscribe on: openai.com/blog

With the unbelievable rise of AI, and more specifically ChatGPT, it’s no surprise that the OpenAI Engineering Blog made it to this list.

Unlike most others on this list, OpenAI’s blog is dedicated exclusively to the development of, you guessed it, AI. It’s really all about the ever-evolving world of language processing and reinforced AI learning. But, since AI is evolving so quickly and being utilized in just about everything, OpenAI's blog is a great place to frequent.

What makes this blog even better is that it presents these super technical concepts in a fairly digestible way. It’s very accessible for anyone to read, so it's a really good stepping stone if you're not already into AI.

They discuss topics like the process for disrupting the malicious use of AI by state-affiliated threat actors, but you can also expect a lot of chatter about ChatGPT, their use of different AI models, and lots and lots of AI feature introductions.

Even though the variety of content is bleak, the OpenAI Engineering Blog makes up for it with almost perfectly written and in-depth content for the AI industry. It’s almost as if they invented the most advanced AI chatbot or something.

Interesting reads

• Disrupting malicious uses of AI by state-affiliated threat actors
• Teaching with AI
• Moving AI governance forward

11. Medium Engineering

Year founded: 2013

Monthly readers: 25k

Upload frequency: Very infrequent

Followers on Medium: 20k

Subscribe on: medium.engineering/

Medium is well known for hosting a very, almost impossibly large variety of content, but did you know that they also have an engineering blog?

The Medium Engineering Blog covers a large range of topics that are curated by several engineering teams. You’ll find topics on backend systems, front-end development, infrastructure, data science, and a lot more. They talk about how they use technology like Kubernetes and SwiftUI and are not shy about discussing the funny oddities they encounter while working on Medium.

They don't post very often, but the quality of Medium’s Engineering Blog is consistently high, and the depth with which they take these articles is impressive, offering insight into these teams’ struggles, challenges, and solutions for their various projects.

Interesting reads

• Building a ChatGPT Plugin for Medium
• Kubernetes Infrastructure At Medium
• Use a .dev domain? Not anymore.

12. Stack Overflow Blog

Year founded: 2016

Monthly readers: 128k

Upload frequency: Weekly

Subscribe on: stackoverflow.blog/

Stack Overflow’s blog is another one that covers everything related to engineering. For simplicity's sake, they've divided it into 5 main categories: Productivity, career advice, AI/ML, open-source, and an "everything" category that captures all of it.

The career advice category is especially helpful for those looking to make a change or get inspired. Truthfully, a lot of these titles like, "To improve as an engineer, get better at requesting feedback" can be applied to careers outside of engineering, but it's looked at through an engineering lens.

It sort of displays itself as an "advice" blog, discussing topics like building (open source) vs. buying (cloud-based) a solution, or talking about/suggesting different styles of engineering. Nonetheless, it's a different take on the typical engineering blog, and it's incredibly entertaining.

When clicking through the blog, you'll notice that a lot of these topics aren't covered in your typical article format. Instead, they've covered it in a prerecorded podcast. This is especially helpful because you get two viewpoints and you can listen while you work.

What's more, is that the blog is extremely organized yet it maintains a level of simplicity that I very much appreciate. They cover AI and open-source engineering extensively and even have a newsletter and podcast that you can follow.

Interesting reads

• How to build cloud-native applications for multi-architecture infrastructure
• Three types of AI-assisted programmers
• Platform engineering is just DevOps with a product mindset

13. Quora Engineering Blog

Year founded: 2000

Monthly readers: 11k

Upload frequency: Very infrequent

Subscribe on: quoraengineering.quora.com/

Quora is well known for being the go-to place for community-led questions and answers of all sorts. I know that I see at least 1 or 2 Quora links every time I Google something. As you can imagine, some extensive front-end and back-end issues come with hosting that many individual threads.

The content in the articles is covered by the lead engineer and their team, and it's the lengths that they go through to explain some topics are impressive. They deep dive into the optimization of Quora's databases, the implementation and scale of Trino, the migration from HBase to MyRocks, and loads more.

There are only 15 known contributors to Quora's blog, so it's not very consistent. That said, there's no shortage of useful information hosted there, as they extensively discuss the issues that arise with such a library. They also discuss how they built their platform as well as things like natural language models, NLP, and machine learning.

Interesting reads

• Building a Service Mesh in a Hybrid Environment
• Adopting Kubernetes at Quora
• Qmessage: Handling Billions of Tasks Per Day

14. Reddit Engineering Blog

Year founded: 2005

Monthly readers: >1,000

Upload frequency: Weekly

Subscribe on: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditEng/

You can’t talk about Quora without talking about Reddit, which also offers its own version of an engineering blog. It’s actually a subreddit, but it covers a variety of topics like tech and engineering challenges.

I think a lot of people sometimes write Reddit off as not a serious platform, riddled with internet trolls and conspiracy theories, but it's more than that. Like Quora, it's an engineering powerhouse that boasts a lot in terms of front-end fluidity and back-end genius.

A standout piece of content on the Reddit engineering blog is their coverage of building Reddit itself. They've divided this coverage into multiple episodes and talked about the evolution of their practices, workflows, and thought processes, and even talked about the future of the project in terms of engineering.

What’s cool about Reddit, and in its usual fashion, the contributors are fairly open about their struggles, challenges, and solutions. It reads much like the Quora Engineering blog does, but with its own Reddit twist.

Interesting reads

• Proper Envoy Shutdown in a Kubernetes World
• From Fragile to Agile: Automating the fight against Flaky Tests
• Building Reddit Ep. 13: Growing Healthy International Communities

15. Heroku Engineering Blog

Year founded: 2007

Monthly readers: 125k

Upload frequency: Monthly

Subscribe on: blog.heroku.com/engineering

If you’re unfamiliar, Heroku is a cloud platform where developers and engineers deploy, manage, and scale applications, much like GitHub. Their engineering blog is sort of niche, mostly covering topics related to deployment issues and different software topics within Heroku, but they also cover things like app development using AI and personal accounts of engineers' experiences.

To spice it up a little, they also offer some code snippets as well as tutorials for developers to improve their skills.

Interesting reads

• Working with ChatGPT Functions on Heroku
• The Adventures of Rendezvous in Heroku’s New Architecture
• Router 2.0: The Road to Beta

Conclusion

There you have it, folks! Our 15 favorite engineering blogs that we read almost daily here at Better Stack. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are a lot, lot more out there. More than just blogs, there are forums and social media groups dedicated to engineering topics, too.

The key to finding the engineering blog(s) to suit you is to just dive in and start reading. This list should give you a great head start, but don’t be afraid to branch out and learn from anywhere and everywhere you can.