July 31, 2012

Interesting (Computer Science) Blogs

I subscribe to various blogs related to Computer Science, Software, Lifestyle, and Technology. I have compiled here that list of blogs and sites that I follow and found to be educational, inspirational, and useful.

1. Study Hacks

This blog is authored by Cal Newport, an assistant professor and computer scientist. He has also the written books that study and profile the secrets of high performers. In this blog, he describes his thoughts and observations on success, performance, and productivity, such as the application of deliberate focus and the methodical construction of remarkable careers and lives.

2. Matt Might's blog

Matt Might is an assistant professor and blogs about a variety of topics ranging from CS to productivity to useful hacks to healthy living. He has a crisp style writing in short sentences and paragraphs. A good read for people interested in CS, software, programming, and learning.

3. Prof. Douglas Thain's blog

My advisor's blog! :) He talks about the problems facing users in building, deploying, and running workloads and applications on distributed systems. He also describes the research we do in studying and devising solutions for these problems, and the software products we build and maintain for users to successfully navigate the challenges of using distributed systems.

4. All Things Distributed

This is a blog maintained by Amazon's CTO, Werner Vogels, who is also known as one of the architects of the Amazon AWS platform. He talks mostly about topics and news related to the Amazon AWS platform. But his recent posts on seminal CS papers that he reads for the weekend take you to the foundations of Computer Science and Engineering.

5. Mashable

A site that curates everything related to technology. They cover and aggregate every aspect of technology ranging from news, product reviews, new announcements and offerings, recommendations, entrepreneurship, tips and tricks.  It helps me stay current with technology and the businesses powered by it.

6. Google Research Blog

Google uses this blog to post on their research and its impact inside and outside of the company. It gives me a peek into how Google approaches and does research on a large scale.

7. Living in an Ivory Basement

A blog about "big data", bio-informatics, Python, and software. Written by Titus Brown, a professor at MSU. The blog has good insights on the challenges facing (biology and bio-informatics) scientists even with access to higher computing capacities becoming easier.

8. Volatile and Decentralized 

This blog is maintained by Matt Welsh, who left a faculty position for industry. His posts touch various topics on research, academia, systems, and software.

9. Google Blog

Google's official blog is regularly updated with news, announcements, insights, tutorials and tips, interviews, and product updates. I use it to see how Google communicates some of its complicated products, technologies, and decisions, to the masses.

10. Peter Norvig's blog

Peter Norvig is the Director of Research at Google. His blog is heavy on Artificial Intelligence, but there are several useful posts and essays on programming. It is also interspersed with posts such as this.

11. profserious

This blog by Anthony Finkelstein, a professor at University College London, talks about a variety of topics ranging from graduate school, academia, software engineering, programming, entrepreneurship.

12. Software & Engineering

Carlos Oliveira's blog focuses on C and C++ programming along with observations on software engineering and practices.