spending more time searching than reading?
You're in the bathroom, doing your daily transit, or getting a quick bite to eat. You sit down and decide to
check HackerNews/reddit/Lobsters to see what comprehensive article you can dig into to get your brain juices
flowing. Click, wait, scan, close. Click, wait, scan, close. Click, wait, meme, chuckle, close. Next thing you
know, your legs are numb/your stop is coming up/you got food all over your pants and you just spent the past 20
minutes filtering with nothing but a meme to show. On the other hand, you could've learned how C++ exceptions
work, discovered a new design pattern, or finally figured out what monads actually are.
Daily Curated In-Depth Articles on Programming
A Byte of Coding is a daily programming newsletter put out Monday through Thursday. Each issue consists of three
recent, technical, long form articles that are curated by
Alex, from more than 700
sources (and growing). Inspiration can be found in the most unexpected places, so selected articles span the
entire software engineering spectrum. Each article comes with a personally written summary.
There are three criteria for the curated articles:
- In depth (focusing on the how and why something works, rather than "How to ...")
- Within the last month (although depending on the quality and timelessness of the article, there are
exceptions)
- Diversity (topics we haven't seen before are rated higher)
What about the articles that are rejected?
Incremental vs. Virtual DOM
is an example of an article that was read, but then rejected. Why? Because although the author outlines the
advantages and disadvantages of both approaches, they fail to explain one of the major points of why the
incremental DOM is slower than virtual, which makes article feel incomplete. On top of that, a lot of the
content is repetitive.
Here are a some of the criteria for rejecting articles:
- Fail to explain major claim that was made
- Full of filler content
- Terrible reading flow
- Not in article format (ie video, podcast, book)
- Directly promoting a commercial product
If staying ontop of your technical game and ahead of the trend appeals to you, I suggest joining us and >2000
programmers by subscribing below! No spam and no sharing of your email.
If you're on the fence, check out what people have to say and the latest issue below.
I wanted to say thank you for this amazing newsletter. And I am honestly telling you, this has helped me a lot.
Apart from the knowledge it provides, it has helped me to become consistent with reading blogs. One of the major
things which I like about the newsletter is the variety of content it has. -
Pankaj T. @the2ndfloorguy
The newsletter helps me find interesting things to read without getting sucked into the online abyss. -
Scott M.
I really like your newsletter, as it covers a broad spectrum of areas in computer science. I usually read your
summaries (which are great!) and then decide if I want to read the full article. I read your newsletter every
day in the morning with a cup of Earl grey tea to start my day. Thanks a lot for making it! -
Moritz K.
Alex successfully filled the void after it's predecessor newsletter. For me there is always at least one
interesting article and - of course - newsletter heading info with personal bits to read. -
Lucas G.