Ever since I've been able to access the Internet, I have been passionate about finding reliable, informative sources for news about all things tech. I have limited bandwidth, so I like high quality, low noise sources.
Source: Joy of Tech
People who don't closely follow tech news and the hacker culture closely wonder how I stay informed about rapidly-changing trends in programming and development and still have a life. The same people often wonder how people I have an answer for almost every question (simple—I just Google it).
In the interest of not having to continue to type out this answer to those people any more, I'm posting the sites I either visit daily in a browser, or have delivered to my RSS reader (currently Reeder, via Feedly), which I flip through twice a day:
- Hacker News - one of the best and (usually) most focused link recommendation sites for 'hackers'. Sometimes a little myopic with regard to startups and silicon valley, but often a good source of weekend reading and conversation on topics that influence the hacker culture.
- Geek Reading - a very simple, daily curated list of some of the best articles found on some of the other sites in this list. If I have a busy day, I'll just glance at the daily Geek Reading post instead of visiting any of the other sites.
- High Scalability - sometimes a little spammy (some of the articles look like copied and pasted press releases), but often full of great insights to what it takes to build large-scale services like Reddit, Twitter, and GitHub.
- Pingdom's must-read articles - Usually posted around lunchtime on Friday, this list contains a few good articles on development, ops, and web performance.
- Reddit - Used to be more interesting, but the community on Reddit seems to slowly be in decline, as many discussions quickly devolve into meme-trading and groan-inducing pun threads. Avoid most of the default subreddits, but check out ones like /r/programming, /r/technology, and /r/diy.
- Ars Technica - One of the very few sites that has been in my news reader since I learned about RSS. Unlike most other tech/science news sites, Ars doesn't copy and edit press releases; there's tons of great content about everything a nerd wants to discover.
Am I missing a really good source of aggregated/curated content? I'm always on the lookout for new sites with high signal to noise ratios. Sources like Reddit are ripe for replacement, as the community grows too broad to be as focused as I like!
I hope my list is helpful for some other nerds/geeks who, like me, enjoy keeping their heads above water in the overflowing sea of tech and programming news.