Top 10 Google & Technorati “Software Development” Sites–Part 2

Disclaimer:

In progressing through this article, I came upon this realisation. It’s quite hard to review just a blog. In general. It’s far easier to look at a specific post (or a bunch of them) than the blog itself.

To refine my statement, it’s harder to write a lot about a blog, in general.

Ha ha ha. That sounded so intelligent in my head. I should fire my writer.

Sequels almost always are worse. X2 being one of the notable exceptions.

This article is more of a continuation than a sequel. In fact, I’m not exactly sure why I started with the sequal chatter.

In Part 1 we looked at the top 10 Google "Software Development" links.

This time we’re checking out the Top 10 Technorati "Software Development" Blogs.

So let’s fly and see what’s to see.

Technorati on "Software Development"

  1. http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/ — Creating Passionate Users

    passionate_001

    Wow.

    This place is pretty awesome. I was grinning at just about all the piccies, and mentally agreeing with fervour reading the posts on the front page.

    This blog is, from the About page, run by three bloggers, Kathy Sierra, Bert Bates, and Eric Freeman.

    This is a very cool site. Of course, I’m only precursor-reviewing it, a scan of the front page and a quick look around. But it gives me hope. When I read the posts, I get a sense of, not family … but similar mindsets. Same direction towards software development.

    Synopsis

      The guys at Creating Passionate Users are all authors, and they know their stuff. This is a great blog to have on your shelf.

  2. http://blog.lifebeyondcode.com/ — Life Beyond Code

    lifebeyondcode_001

    Okay. Wow. Again.

    I’m not sure about anyone reading this, but I’m excited. Just two blogs in, and I’m wondering if every blog is going to speak to me like these.

    Rajesh Setty has a really easy to read style. The current top post, "10 ideas to get new ideas", is quality. These are gems. Write them deep.

    It’s a simple blog. By that, I mean it’s straight-forward. It’s a blog. Posts. Clean and pure.

    Synopsis

      Life Beyond Code, at first glance (and no doubt further) is a diamond of a blog.

  3. http://www.procata.com/blog — Professional PHP Blog

    phpblog_001

    Jeff Moore has a very specific blog here. From his main blog the catchphrase is : Web Development with PHP, PHP Advocacy and Best Practices.

    The current posts have a fair bit of examination of PHP as opposed to other web languages around today. Well, that’s not true. Not just "web" languages.

    It was interesting reading these posts. And the bookmarks.

    Synopsis

      If you are looking to find knowledge and wisdom on PHP, go here.

  4. http://www.hojohnlee.com/weblog/ — Ho John Lee’s Weblog

    hojohnlee_001

    Ho John Lee has a pretty nifty blog. You can translate the pages into a bunch of different languages, and the extra links are along the top, instead of toward the bottom, as most sites have them. By "extra" i mean RSS, Del.icio.us, Flickr … etc.

    The blog covers most everything, not just Software Development. It’s more that there’s a bunch of categories underneath Technology. So where we (at Dev Dawn) have pretty much a single category, Ho John Lee has broken everything down. Far easier to search.

    Also, there are pictures. I’ve said it before, and most probably will say it again, but pictures make a blog very cool. I’ve neglected this truth, even after uncovering it, but it’s there, nonetheless.

    Synopsis

      It seems to me that Ho John Lee’s Weblog is the place to go for insightful and clear thoughts about most anything happening in the technological world. Cool.

  5. http://serversideguy.blogspot.com/ — Chris Justus – Server Side Guy

    serversideguy_001

    This is a good blog. You can tell Chris Justus is writing about his own experiences, working within software development. It’s a meaty blog. Got some cool stuff up there now too, the MiteSite Chat is cool. A nice experiment on the way to greater heights i imagine.

    Chris works for Alcea Technologies who have, amongst other things, Bug-Tracking software (which Chris created) in their stable. Now, by works for, I mean … is a founding member / Director, heh heh.

    As with the other blogs, the more I poke around, the more there is to like.

    Synopsis

      Chris Justus knows his stuff. More than that, from my cursory reading, he pushes himself further. Working on little projects to enhance his already big-time experience.

  6. http://agylen.com/ — Ugo Cei’s Weblog

    agylen_001

    Man alive! The first post at Agylen pointed me here: Crazy Multi-Input Touch Screen. Now this is such a cool video. You have to watch it. I’m breaking the rules a bit, as this isn’t directly to do with the blog … but you have to watch this. Very cool.

    Anyway. Ugo Cei is a software architect (and dev) living in Italy. I like the ambience (posh accent) of this site. Very calming. Zen-like, although I only use that word to mean peace. Which it probably does mean.

    Ahem.

    Another cool stick is the top menu. Simple. Four links, very nice. Book Reviews is a great link to have at the top of the page, especially if you have quite a few of them. What is better to mankind than a review? Nothing, except maybe a nice MLT.

    Kudos to Ugo. It’s a great blog.

    And, as seems to be a trend in this list, the more you look around, the more there is to like. This site is Tight. Little marks of careful design and UI are excellent. The borders around various sidebars/posts … love the "my del.icio.us tags" segment. Very classy.

    And now that I have (since the starting paragraph for Agylen.com) looked further … if you’re interest in books about development, head here.

    Synopsis

      This is a quality site. Not just the content (really careful, well-thought-out book reviews, and other stuff too), but the design. The Look’n’Feel. Quality.

  7. http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView — Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

    smalltalk_001

    Okay. It took me a while (snail brain, just used links from the blog, not the smart way, which would have been to Google it), but I discovered that Smalltalk is more than just a catchy name for a blog.

    Smalltalk is a portable, pure object-oriented langauge that runs on all popular platforms. It is known for being one of the best ways to learn object-oriented programming. Smalltalk is also a complete environment, designed especially for rapid development and deployment of applications. Read this overview to learn more reasons to develop in Smalltalk.

    Cool. So we’ve now got a blog about a language. No. Not really, from what I can tell, it’s a blog by a gent who works in Smalltalk, amongst other things, and blogs about that, plus a lot of other cool stuff. Coming from Oz, it’s pretty cool to see pictures of the snow.

    The ability to change styles is cool. It suspends my belief that it’s just a single blog engine. In fact, that’s part of the magic. The user doesn’t usually think about the engine of a blog. They think about the way it comes across to them, and the styles here are different enough that changing them is actually a piece of functionality in and of itself (not fluff).

    Synopsis

      Ha ha. If I’d actually examined the blog further before writing, and looked properly instead of skimming over words I thought were not important, I would have noticed this … ‘Powered by Cincom Smalltalk‘. Ha ha, man alive, good reporting son.

      This is cool. Writing a blog, with a bent towards a Product, that has been used to create the blog itself. The engine. Nice.

  8. http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/ — Dennis Forbes, Pragmatic Software Development

    dennisforbes_001

    Here’s a fellow who knows his stuff. Dennis Forbes is a self-confessed uber-guru at coding, database architectures, and can probably code in any language known to man. I made up the uber-guru word, translated it from Dennis’ About page.

    So yeah, he really does know his stuff.

    The top post (at time of writing), is an excellent article on Wiki and Windows (specifically, hosting a Wiki on Windows), but has many sideline wisdom nuggets.

    Very cool. Step-by-step tutorials are really cool. It means someone has taken the time to break down the process into bite-sized chunks.

    Synopsis

      The more of these blogs I read, the more I am washed out into the raging ocean. There is so much wisdom out there, so many people with brain-power that boggles my mind. Dennis Forbes’ blog is a quality piece of work. His Notables are really cool. Read them.

  9. http://weblog.cemper.com/ —

    Okay, so at the time of writing, I can’t get this site to load. Wierd. Skipping now.

  10. http://spaces.msn.com/tedmalone/ — Teds Space, A day in the life of a .NET Architect

    tedmalone_001

    This one was a little harder for me to get into. Possibly because i’m at the end of this list. But also because it’s heavily tied into the use of Microsoft .NET Passport. Although I’ve got one, it was annoying that I couldn’t actually see the "About" page of the author without logging in with the Passport details … nothing against you Ted, you’re the author, not the engine …

    The blog hasn’t been updated in a little while, but with some brain-power, the posts have some nice info. Not being into MS stuff that much wasn’t really a problem.

    The one thing I would like more of is more of Ted. Most of the posts are a few lines … Personally (and I mean this is my opinion, noone else’s) I want to find out more about the author through the way they write. And I want to read posts with lots of manical laughter (scratch that), with meat on their bones. But that’s just me.

    Synopsis

    • Although I couldn’t get into the blog as much as others, this is a blog with some nice info. And the slide show down the bottom is cool. Very nice.

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