I am sure we all read Coding Horror, Spolsky, Zed and Hanselman, but can this community help me identify some of the other great developer/hacker focused bloggers?
I like Steve Yegge's archive, especially the original "internal amazon blog" (2004-2005): <a href="http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/blog-rants" rel="nofollow">http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/blog-rants</a><p>Planet Apache can be interesting (an aggregator of apache committers). Extreme variation in quality, but James Duncan Davidson and Sam Ruby and a few others make it all worth it:
<a href="http://planet.apache.org/committers/" rel="nofollow">http://planet.apache.org/committers/</a><p>Anton Chuvakin for security: <a href="http://chuvakin.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">http://chuvakin.blogspot.com/</a>
What I do is use sites like Hacker news to discover other sites - if I like a story, I'll check the rest of the site to see if the author writes consistently good stuff, and if so subscribe.<p>I've found a lot of cool stuff that way.
I don't have any specific blogs for you at the moment, but go with someone who is smart but unknown. Unknowns have to produce good content to stay afloat. At this point Coding Horror and Spolsky can get away with just about anything because of their success. It's too easy to assume that the big names are correct without critically thinking about their words.
The best blogs for me, are those that are not for the great hacker public, but for smaller audiences. Blogs about mathematics, data mining, computer vision, and so on. Coding Horror, Spolsky and the alike only talk about generalities and aren't really useful to me.
I enjoy DadHacker a lot, partly because I enjoy anecdotes, but mostly because Landon writes extremely well and seems like a nice guy without an agenda (unlike Joel and friends). I also used to read _why's blog from time to time before he vanished.<p>Mostly I just follow HN and proggit. I'm not very big on blogs.
A few of my favorites that I didn't see people list; note that many of these are sort of combined personal blogs and programming-related (like mine - <a href="http://joeganley.com" rel="nofollow">http://joeganley.com</a>):<p>- <a href="http://wilshipley.com" rel="nofollow">http://wilshipley.com</a><p>- <a href="http://lbrandy.com" rel="nofollow">http://lbrandy.com</a><p>- <a href="http://nedbatchelder.com" rel="nofollow">http://nedbatchelder.com</a><p>- <a href="http://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/" rel="nofollow">http://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/</a>
Raymond Chen's very Windows focused The Old New Thing - <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/</a>
Two I have in my reader:<p>Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP - <a href="http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/" rel="nofollow">http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/</a><p>Igvata - <a href="http://www.igvita.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.igvita.com/</a> (Ruby based, sometimes too terse)