Blogroll

Vincent Bernat

LLMs drown the web in sloppy and dull ar­ti­cles. The small web still ex­ists and pro­duces cap­ti­vat­ing con­tent writ­ten by hu­mans. To help you find it, this page lists the blogs I fol­low in my feed reader. The ones marked with ⭐ are my fa­vorites. You can also im­port this list into your own reader with the OPML file.

Favorites#

  • Bar­tosz Ciechanowski In­ter­ac­tive vis­ual ex­pla­na­tions of how me­chan­i­cal things work. Each ar­ti­cle is an in­struc­tional piece of art.
  • Ben Cox In­ter­net rout­ing, BGP, and net­work ex­per­i­ments. Many of his blog posts are in­no­va­tive: run­ning Linux on a Mel­lanox SN2010, find­ing flaws in BGP im­ple­men­ta­tions, and hunt­ing down stuck BGP routes.
  • Chris Sieben­mann Uni­ver­sity of Toronto sysad­min on Unix, ZFS, and Linux. I re­mem­ber dis­cov­er­ing his blog in 2016 and spend­ing sev­eral days brows­ing all the articles.
  • Fa­bien Sanglard Au­thor of the Wolf3D and Doom Game En­gine Black Books on retro game code. Ev­ery ar­ti­cle is a lit­tle gem if you are even slightly in­ter­ested in old games. His writ­ing is quite ap­proachable.
  • Michael Lynch Ex-Google en­gi­neer and founder of TinyPilot on boot­strap­ping and self-host­ing. He is also the au­thor of “Refac­tor­ing Eng­lish.” His ar­ti­cle on why he quit Google is still one of the best in­sights into how some mod­ern com­pa­nies work. He hires an il­lus­tra­tor to add a cool il­lus­tra­tion to many of his posts.
  • Solène Rapenne For­mer OpenBSD de­vel­oper on self-host­ing and NixOS. Her ar­ti­cles pack a lot of prac­ti­cal in­for­ma­tion, and I al­ways en­joy read­ing them.

By category#

The “com­put­ing” cat­e­gory acts as a catch-all since many blog­gers write about var­i­ous domains.

Computing

  • Bar­tosz Ciechanowski ⭐ In­ter­ac­tive vis­ual ex­pla­na­tions of how me­chan­i­cal things work. Each ar­ti­cle is an in­struc­tional piece of art.
  • Chris Sieben­mann ⭐ Uni­ver­sity of Toronto sysad­min on Unix, ZFS, and Linux. I re­mem­ber dis­cov­er­ing his blog in 2016 and spend­ing sev­eral days brows­ing all the articles.
  • Michael Lynch ⭐ Ex-Google en­gi­neer and founder of TinyPilot on boot­strap­ping and self-host­ing. He is also the au­thor of “Refac­tor­ing Eng­lish.” His ar­ti­cle on why he quit Google is still one of the best in­sights into how some mod­ern com­pa­nies work. He hires an il­lus­tra­tor to add a cool il­lus­tra­tion to many of his posts.
  • Solène Rapenne ⭐ For­mer OpenBSD de­vel­oper on self-host­ing and NixOS. Her ar­ti­cles pack a lot of prac­ti­cal in­for­ma­tion, and I al­ways en­joy read­ing them.
  • Ad­hityaa Chan­drasekar Notes on soft­ware en­gi­neer­ing by the au­thor of Commento
  • Ben Kuhn For­mer CTO of Wave on en­gi­neer­ing management
  • Benoit Sigoure OpenTSDB au­thor on sys­tems and in­fra­structure
  • Bozhi­dar Batsov Cre­ator of RuboCop and CIDER on Emacs, OCaml, and Clo­jure tooling
  • Chris Glass Canon­i­cal en­gi­neer on Ubuntu, OpenBSD, and sys­tem ad­min­istration
  • Dan Brown Cre­ator of BookStack on open source main­te­nance and hardware
  • Daniel Alek­sander­sen On ev­ery­day tech and ob­scure details
  • Dan Luu Soft­ware en­gi­neer­ing, per­for­mance, and in­dus­try analysis
  • David Ál­varez Rosa Low-level per­for­mance and self-hosting
  • Diego Elio Pet­tenò For­mer Gen­too de­vel­oper on self-host­ing and electronics
  • Drew DeVault Cre­ator of SourceHut and Sway on free soft­ware, Unix, and politics
  • Émile “iMil” Heitor NetBSD de­vel­oper on vir­tu­al­iza­tion and self-hosting
  • Gus­tavo Duarte How com­put­ers and op­er­at­ing sys­tems work
  • Henry Robin­son Dis­trib­uted sys­tems pa­pers. Un­for­tu­nately, he hasn’t writ­ten a new ar­ti­cle in years.
  • Jan-Piet Mens DNS and An­si­ble con­sul­tant on sysad­min tooling
  • Jan Schau­mann NetBSD de­vel­oper and se­cu­rity en­gi­neer on In­ter­net in­fra­structure
  • Jean-Bap­tiste Kempf Pres­i­dent of VideoLAN on VLC, FFmpeg, and multimedia
  • Jeff Geer­ling YouTuber on Rasp­berry Pi, home­lab, and hardware
  • Jérôme Petaz­zoni Early Docker em­ployee on con­tain­ers and Ku­bernetes
  • Joel Knight Cloud se­cu­rity, AWS, and OpenBSD
  • Jonas Hi­etala Home­lab, Ku­ber­netes, Neovim, and keyboards
  • Ju­lia Evans Au­thor of Wiz­ard Zines on Linux, net­work­ing, and pro­gramming
  • Lina In­ter­net cen­sor­ship in Ger­many and se­cu­rity research
  • Mads Hart­mann Ob­serv­abil­ity, SRE, and Nix
  • Marc Brooker AWS en­gi­neer on dis­trib­uted sys­tems and databases
  • Mat Dug­gan Opin­ions on in­fra­struc­ture and op­erations
  • Ma­thieu Cor­bin Ob­serv­abil­ity, Ku­ber­netes, and soft­ware ca­reers. I worked with Math­ieu at Ex­oscale. While I dis­agree with many of his ar­ti­cles, I still en­joy read­ing them. (in French)
  • Nel­son Figueroa Short how-tos on tools, cloud, and macOS
  • Pierre de La Morinerie Ruby, Rails, and Game Boy re­verse en­gineering
  • Rachel Kroll For­mer Google and Face­book SRE with sysad­min war stories
  • Sam Rose In­ter­ac­tive vis­ual ex­pla­na­tions of al­gorithms
  • Sean Goedecke GitHub en­gi­neer on soft­ware en­gi­neer­ing cul­ture at large companies
  • Sergey Tselo­val­nikov Soft­ware en­gi­neer­ing practices
  • Si­mon Hørup Es­kild­sen Co-founder of tur­bop­uffer on nap­kin math and databases
  • Si­mon Willi­son Co-cre­ator of Django on LLMs. He is now fa­mous for test­ing LLMs with pel­i­cans. One of the best-known blog­gers on LLMs.
  • Susam Pal Com­put­ing, math­e­mat­ics, and small tools
  • Tyler Croy Jenk­ins con­trib­u­tor on Rust and self-hosting
  • Will Lar­son En­gi­neer­ing ex­ec­u­tive and au­thor on en­gi­neer­ing lead­er­ship. I still have to read his books.
  • Willy Tar­reau HAProxy au­thor on per­for­mance, hard­ware, and data structures
  • Xe Iaso Au­thor of Anu­bis on pro­gram­ming, Nix, and tech culture
  • Yash Garg Per­sonal es­says on soft­ware and life

Network

  • Ben Cox ⭐ In­ter­net rout­ing, BGP, and net­work ex­per­i­ments. Many of his blog posts are in­no­va­tive: run­ning Linux on a Mel­lanox SN2010, find­ing flaws in BGP im­ple­men­ta­tions, and hunt­ing down stuck BGP routes.
  • Alcé Lafranque Tele­com net­work­ing, EVPN, and IPv6
  • Christo­pher Hart Net­work en­gi­neer­ing and Cisco trou­bleshooting
  • CZ.NIC Staff Blog DNS, BIRD, and Knot from the .cz registry
  • Dmytro Shy­po­valov Seg­ment rout­ing and traf­fic en­gineering
  • Ivan Pe­pel­n­jak Founder of ipSpace.net on net­work de­sign and pro­to­cols. A must-read for most net­work en­gi­neers, with a lot of ed­u­ca­tional con­tent and labs.
  • Michael Kashin Net­work au­to­ma­tion, YANG, and SDN
  • Michael McNamara En­ter­prise net­work­ing and trou­bleshooting
  • Mircea Ulinic NAPALM main­tainer on net­work au­to­ma­tion with Salt
  • NLnet Labs DNS and rout­ing se­cu­rity software
  • Radovan Brezula Net­work labs, GNS3, and Raspberry Pi
  • Ro­man Dodin Cre­ator of con­tain­er­lab on net­work au­to­ma­tion and gNMI
  • Sté­phane Bortz­meyer AFNIC en­gi­neer on RFCs, DNS, and In­ter­net gov­er­nance (in French)

Linux

  • Bootlin Em­bed­ded Linux and ker­nel en­gineering
  • Bren­dan Gregg Cre­ator of flame graphs on sys­tems per­for­mance. He is an ex­pert in ob­serv­abil­ity, with DTrace on So­laris and eBPF on Linux. Too bad he didn’t like SystemTap!
  • Greg Kroah-Hart­man Linux sta­ble ker­nel main­tainer on ker­nel de­vel­op­ment and CVEs
  • Jean-Tiare Le Bigot Linux net­work­ing, eBPF, and Ku­bernetes
  • Lennart Po­et­ter­ing Cre­ator of sys­temd and Pulse­Audio on Linux plumbing
  • Marc Richards Linux HTTP per­for­mance tuning
  • people.kernel.org Blogs of Linux ker­nel de­velopers

Programming

Retrocomputing

  • Fa­bien Sanglard ⭐ Au­thor of the Wolf3D and Doom Game En­gine Black Books on retro game code. Ev­ery ar­ti­cle is a lit­tle gem if you are even slightly in­ter­ested in old games. His writ­ing is quite ap­proachable.
  • An­drew Green­wood OPL3 syn­the­sis and DOS hacking
  • Gus­tavo Pezzi Founder of Pikuma on retro game pro­gramming
  • Joshua Stein OpenBSD de­vel­oper on clas­sic Mac­in­tosh hacking
  • Mark Chris­tian Game Boy car­tridges and gam­ing history
  • Scali Graph­ics, retro PC hard­ware, and Windows

Web

Desktop

  • Bruno Gar­cia Vim, i3, and min­i­mal­ist computing
  • Gideon Wolfe Linux desk­top cus­tomiza­tion and ter­mi­nal tools
  • Jeezy Cre­ator of ko­morebi on tiling win­dow man­agers, Rust, and Nix
  • Mas­ter­ing Emacs Mickey Pe­tersen on Emacs tips and features

Cartoons

  • Lau­rel Duer­mael Drawn di­ary of a French il­lus­tra­tor (in French)
  • Mon­key User Comics about soft­ware de­velopment
  • PhD comics Jorge Cham’s comics about life in academia
  • Tom Fish­burne Car­toons about mar­ket­ing and business
  • What if? Ran­dall Munroe an­swer­ing ab­surd ques­tions with physics
  • XKCD Ran­dall Munroe’s we­b­comic about sci­ence, math, and com­put­ers. You can il­lus­trate a lot of sub­jects with an XKCD comic!

Games

  • Ga­ming since 198x Video game his­tory and retro gam­ing (in French)
  • Jor­dan Mech­ner Cre­ator of Prince of Per­sia, now a graphic nov­el­ist. He is my sec­ond-fa­vorite game author.
  • Ron Gilbert Cre­ator of Mon­key Is­land on game de­sign. He is my fa­vorite game author.

Misc

  • Da­vid Lar­let Notes on the web, tech­nol­ogy, and so­ci­ety (in French)
  • Da­vid Ma­dore French math­e­ma­ti­cian on maths, sci­ence, and so­ci­ety. Win­ner of the prize for the long­est blog posts. (in French)
  • Maître Eo­las French lawyer on jus­tice and law (in French)
  • Na­ta­cha Ke­ren­si­kova Per­sonal es­says (in French)
  • Nick Por­cino Es­says on tech­nol­ogy, cre­ativ­ity, and AI
  • Tris­tan Ni­tot Founder of Mozilla Eu­rope on dig­i­tal free­dom and ecol­ogy (in French)
  • Uses This In­ter­views about the tools people use