Code Monkey Island

Reading blogs (and forums, groups, etc) that are related to my work helps me stay interested, excited, and learning. I knew that it was time to leave Java-land when I stopped caring about reading Java-related blogs.

Here are my current favorites. I hope that some of you will find something useful in here. Maybe a good link, maybe an idea…

(After I started writing this I realized that my favorites folder is actually pretty thin. I’m subscribed to a zillion things but only a handful have made the hop from “tech” to “tech favorites”)

Things that aren’t listed here…

For most of the open source software that I really care about, I subscribe to the personal blogs of the creators, Trac feeds, Google groups, whatever. I’m using the latest code from many different projects and I like to know about new happenings, new ideas, all that.

Del.icio.us RSS

One great way to keep up with a specific topic is by subscribing to the del.icio.us/popular feeds for the tags that you are interested in. Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service, which means that the “popular” links are things that are bookmarked by large numbers of people and the quality is usually pretty good.

Here are a few examples: ruby, rails, ui.

The feeds for things like “css”, “javascript”, etc sometimes turn up good links but they are pretty noisy. I find that most of the really good stuff that hits sites like Digg, Slashdot, etc will find their way to delicious’ popular page. I also often go to del.icio.us before I go to Google if I am researching technical topics.

Ruby or Rails centric

• Application Error - a great tumblelog full of random interesting tidbits
• Err the Blog - cool stuff, heavy on the code
• Robby on Rails - interesting codey tidbits
• Dr. Nic - Dr. Nic is always cooking up something in his lab
• Ryan’s Scraps - Ryan reads and summarizes the Edge Rails changesets so that you don’t have to. Chu Yeow also has a good Edge log
• Nuby on Rails - good stuff
• Ruby Fleebie - I bumped into Frank’s blog a long time ago. I like it.

Like minds

• I read LibraryThing’s main blog and Thingology blog. LibraryThing is the only web company (that I know of) that seems really similar to Ravelry in spirit and in execution. I find their blog to be really interesting (and sometimes, eerily familiar)

Web stuff

• Ajaxian - high volume, but most of the interesting Javascript happenings hit their pages.
• Douglas Crockford
• High Scalability - jury’s still out on this one, but there have been a few really interesting posts

MySQL

• MySQL Performance Blog: nearly every post is a gem

General geeky stuff

• Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror - you’re gonna hear about his posts anyway so you might as well read them Give it a try - I used to look forward to new posts but now I feel like he is swinging for the fences every time.
• xkcd - you know, the stick figure guy

On a kinda related note - I’m not going to be able to make it to RubyFringe. Damn. Anyway - it’s a not-your-average Ruby conference in Toronto. Check out the list of speakers..