Favourite Developer Sites

As I progress through my journey as a developer, I’ve started spending more time interested in people’s personal blogs and websites. Personal blogs off sites like Medium or dev.to are an absolute treasure trove of information - the good ones require effort - whereas on dedicated blogging sites I’ve started to feel like the content is often unoriginal, uninspired, or just lacking.

Recently, as I’ve been developing my personal site, I’ve been trawling through developer blogs and portfolios to gain inspiration and I’ve collated a list of my favourite ones.

Whether it may be obvious to you or not, many of these sites have served as inspiration for my own.

Good artists borrow, great artists steal use inspect element

— Pablo Picasso

Paul Stamatiou

If I had one word to describe Paul’s website, it would be an onion.

You’re greeted by a minimalistic and clean-looking homepage, no doubt about that. But it’s when you start peeling back the layers, start exploring the site, that the intricate details start coming out.

Paul describes himself on his about page as a “designer & developer working in crypto.” The fact that designer comes before developer shows his focus — and Paul’s design skills are quickly apparent as you start exploring his site — I’ll leave that up to you to experience for yourself, but I particularly love the photosets.

His content is also superb and very extensive, he started blogging in 2005 and has had over a thousand posts since then. His posts are also very detailed — this post on building his pc has over 30000 words.

Paul’s website was one of the first I found (from Hackernews) and one of my favourites.

Nikiv’s Wiki

Nikiv’s site is extremely unique, instead of a blog or portfolio site, he has created a Knowledge Wiki, where he shares “everything he knows”. He updates the site nearly every day (~11 thousand commits) with whatever links or thoughts he’s had throughout the day. He has covered so many topics, from art to philosophy to physics, and of course a lot of programming-related subjects.

When I first found this site, I spent the entire weekend poring through it. I think it’s a great resource to find articles on topics you’re interested in, as Nikiv claims, more likely than not, he’s written something about it.

Josh W. Comeau

Josh’s site is much more frontend focused. He writes a lot about React and CSS, and his blogs are extremely high quality. His site is just delightful to browse through, and something extremely unique is his use of sound to add that extra detail.

His blogs also utilise MDX (markdown with support for custom components), so as you read through his blog, many interactive elements help him convey his message, such as code-sandboxes and quizzes.

His knowledge of CSS is also astounding, I learnt so much I never knew from his CSS tutorials, particularly on Margin Collapse and CSS Transforms.

Yagmur C. Tas

A very unique design that I really appreciated. It’s a lot more artsy and cozy-feeling compared to the other professionally done personal sites on this list. This site is also where I got the inspiration for “Tidbits” as I thought it was a great way to inject more personality without being over-the-top.

Overreacted

Dan Abramov’s blog — co-creator of Redux and Create-React-App, he’s probably the most famous face of React.js. His blog contains a lot of insight into Javascript and React which I found useful, particularly his post on What Is Javascript Made Of and Writing Resilient Components. His Decade in Review also inspired me quite a bit — to learn about his beginnings and that he wasn’t some genius coder, that everybody starts somewhere.

Tania Rascia

I found Tania’s website from hackernews and something about it just stuck with me. She writes a lot of tutorials, mostly front-end related. She’s created quite a few open source projects as well and her articles detailing those are my favourite as I can look through the code to glean a deeper understanding of whatever she’s written about.

Web Dev Simplified

Kyle is probably more famous as a YouTuber than a blogger — his channel on YouTube has garnered over 69 million views and is still one of my main sources of tutorials and information.

Recently I’ve been reading his posts instead of watching his videos as I find it easier to find relevant parts and tinker around with the code. He has a wealth of experience in the area of web development and his blog posts distil that information pretty concisely.

Arun.is

Arun’s site reminds me of paulstamatiou.com — it’s design-centric, with detailed, long-form articles that focus on content and high-quality pictures that punctuates and encapsulates his points. Several of his articles are also very well-researched and informative, such as the one on Apple Watch faces and the Apple Card.

I also found this post detailing his blogging workflow particularly insightful.

Bartosz Ciechanowski

Ciechanowski’s site is one of the highest-quality sites I’ve seen. He has only 2-3 posts per year, but each post goes very in-depth. His article on mechanical watches must have taken weeks, if not months, to put together, and his site has interactive 3D models that show off the mechanisms he’s trying to explain.

Every single one of his posts is a work of art. The level of care, craftsmanship and attention to detail in his work is exceptional.