Where I Get Tech News in 2024

I share links to tech articles and projects somewhat regularly in work slack, and a teammate recently asked how I keep up with industry pulse and trends. I'll snapshot my current resources even though it will quickly become outdated, but I also want to talk a little bit about the how things changed drastically in the last two years or so.

So the basic narrative is:

1. I got pretty deep into node.js back end development between 2011 and 2018 and was very dialed in ~2016
2. Things changed after COVID and after ZIRP with twitter, stackoverflow, and reddit all experiencing major permanent disruptions
3. I have a new set of information sources now but it's unstable and chaotic and disappointing

My current somewhat disappointing setup

Key points here, more details below.

• I follow aggregators for both Hacker News and lobsters on mastodon.
  • I kind of like having these in my fediverse feed and generally do not go directly to their web site home pages.
  • Any links too long to read immediately I save to Omnivore to read later.
• I have a jumble of tech accounts I follow on mastodon but essentially the very good set I built up over 14 years on twitter is gone
  • Anyone who has given a talk at Strangeloop or !!Con is probably worth following at least for a while to sample
  • Some thought leaders have come over from twitter and I managed to find them
• I pay a fair amount of attention to Rands Leadership Slack
• I subscribe to the Golang Weekly email newsletter
• I have a kind of roundabout way of tracking blog posts coming out of Recurse Center and their internal community Zulip chat surfaces good links and interesting discussions regularly. I don't track it very closely as it's too active to stay on top of.
• I subscribe to some tech podcasts. Mostly long-form interviews but some news bulletin types.
  • Software Unscripted with Richard Feldman is my current favorite.
  • The Changelog is good for general open source and tech industry news
  • Go Time from the same team behind The Changelog is their go-specific podcast.
  • Backend Banter is good for backend interviews and topics.
  • Cup o' Go is short coverage of go news

Noticeably absent from this suite of tools is any kind of RSS reader. I don't have one I like anymore and it's tragic. I'm also much more OK with keeping looser tabs on things these days as I have both a full-time job and a very involved side business running Focus Retreat Center so I just can't dial in like I did a decade ago.

A brief description of the peak circa 2018

Most of my tech news came from twitter and I followed a great set of accounts that meant almost every project, startup, product ever discussed in work slack or at a tech conference was something I had at the very least already heard about and most likely read a few paragraphs to have the basic elevator pitch. I'm sure at this point I could have named from memory 50 people active in the node.js ecosystem and mapped dozens of companies and relationships.

I had a very dialed-in set of RSS blogs subscriptions and used feedly extensively to track dozens and dozens of high-quality tech blogs.

I was very active on stackoverflow answering about 1600 questions mostly about node.js and used it extensively for technical problems but also for finding experts in particular topics and sometimes following them on social media directly.

I was on dozens of smaller slack communities affiliated with either specific meetup groups, specific industry groups like independent consultants or freelancers, particular topics of interest, etc. I didn't track all of these super closely, but I could scan across them periodically and find interesting stuff.

I went to conferences more regularly including 4 trips to Strangeloop, a couple of node.js conferences, a few rust conferences, and some for work. I belonged to many meetup groups and went somewhat frequently. I lived in Boulder at the time so the local tech scene was small but robust enough. I frequented Code & Coffee at Dojo4 and Github in Boulder.

Elon and enshittification

Elon ruined it. Twitter kind of imploded and the ads are now intolerable and it's way too much politics and arguing. I still have my account but very rarely read it and basically stopped posting. Several people I love reading still seem to only post to twitter and I'm basically waiting and hoping to find a better way to get their writing.

Reddit also had a meltdown right around the same time. I didn't really use reddit for tech stuff though. I know about a few subreddits but they were kind of a last resort for me, usually on very niche projects like awesomewm or hammerspoon. I did use it a ton for maker stuff and specifically /r/ergomechkeyboards. It went away when reddit leadership screwed with moderators/API leading up to the IPO circa 2023 and I never migrated to any of the proposed alternatives. It's kind of back to normal now but feels slightly less active.

Stackoverflow is kinda done and LLMs are mostly replacing it for coding work. It's still a useful repository knowledge base but I think it's mostly a read-only archive at this point.

Feedly got enshittified with bizarre UI, a steady stream of nonsense no one wanted nor asked for in what was at one point a polished, text-forward web app with excellent keyboard shortcuts. I bailed out when I literally could not understand the UI because it was so design-heavy bizarre with strange expand/collapse behavior and lost all its visual hierarchy. I have tried a bunch of terminal-based TUI RSS clients but they're all quite lacking. Even the oldest most mature ones would consistently crash for me on basic use cases. All the new ones in rust or go usually show some promise but have a long roadmap to build before they are conveniently usable. There probably is a good RSS reader out there but I have not yet found one or had enough time and motivation to re-curate a good blog feed.

I work from home and only do long drives every few weeks, so my podcast info is usually months old by the time I listen to it.

It's kind of sad at the moment. I would love to get another good RSS setup going and fill out my mastodon feed better, but time will tell.