For any given week, most of my (non-book) reading material come from the newsletters I’m signed up for.
Twitter and Facebook used to be great to see what my friends were reading and what articles they were recommending. However, at some point, it became too overwhelming and difficult to find the signal through the noise. Newsletters have been a good source of high quality reading, especially for specific topics (iOS, data, etc).
Newsletters have recently come back in vogue (even the NYTimes is on it!) so it’s not hard to find good newsletters everywhere. Here are a few that I really enjoy:
Tech Related
It’s probably not surprising that many of the newsletters I’m subscribed to are tech-related.
- Software Lead Weekly. This newsletter compiles a list of articles about the non-technical side of engineering: teams, process, leadership, etc. This newsletter consistently yields at least one really good read every week. It also often introduces me to authors that I end up following on Twitter.
- Stratechery. This is probably my favorite newsletter. It’s a paid newsletter Ben Thompson writes about the tech industry. While I don’t agree with everything he writes, I like this newsletter because he avoids a lot of the hot takes you see on twitter and tries to take a macro look at everything. He also publishes 1 non-subscriber article a week. Definitely worth reading!
- iOS Dev Weekly. All the happenings around the world of iOS. This is particularly interesting since we don’t write any Swift at Instagram and this helps keep me up to date.
- ny tech Daily. A daily round up of NY related startup news. Now that I’m at a Big Tech Coâ„¢, this is a easy way for me to have a general awareness what is happening in the NY tech scene
- Golang Weekly. I’ve been skipping this lately since I don’t use Go in a meaningful way anymore 😠The backend services at Timehop were all built using Go and this was a good newsletter back then to stay current and find out about new libraries we can use.
Non-Tech
- Nuzzel. not exactly a newsletter – more of a meta-newsletter. I read this one everyday because this service aggregates the most shared links amongst your twitter followers or facebook friends and sends you a digest of the most popular ones. I get the benefit of my friends tweets and facebook posts without having to log on.
- NYTimes Daily – pretty self explanatory. News, every morning
- Data is Plural. This is a fun one for data & dataviz nerds. This newsletter finds interesting open data sets you can play around with
- The Prepared. This is another fun one: it compiles links to reading about manufacturing, processes, logistics and city planning. It sounds really dry but I find that a lot of the reading has broad appeal.
- Consumed / Created. My friend Peter writes a weekly newsletter where he compiles a few pieces of media he has consumed in the past week and finishes with sharing one thing he has created.
I’d love your recommendations as well!