Saturday, September 20, 2008

18 sites good web developers must know about

The best web developers are always looking to not only hone their craft, but also for ways to stay updated on what's happening on the cutting edge. With our time stretched so thin as it is, we don't often have time to scour the web for new sites or other up and comers who have something new to offer or something interesting to say. That is where this list comes in. If you're a web developer of any kind and you love what you do, you should at least know about these sites. If you know of a site that you believe should be on this list, feel free to leave a comment telling me all about it. The list of sites that all good web developers must know about (in no meaningful order) are as follows:

  1. Hacker news - For those who don't know, this is a reddit-type news site from the Y Combinator folks. Here you'll find everything from arguments over the state of Lisp to startup advice.
  2. Programming.reddit.com - Reddit's programming section. Similar to Hacker News but often more related to actual programming.
  3. Ajaxian - Ajaxian is a good way to stay on top of developments in the javascript world and the various javascript libraries currently in existence. If anyone of them made any interesting progress, you would hear about it here.
  4. Stack Overflow - Don't you hate sites that hide their useful content behind subscription fees and ads? Unlike other programming help type sites, Stack Overflow is actually quite useful. People ask questions and (most of the time) knowledgeable people answer them.
  5. InfoQ - Decent articles and good interviews with more focus on the enterprise dev community.
  6. Github - It's almost like a social network for developers. You can watch other peoples branches, fork their project and make it your own, donate to projects and a more. Since open source projects get hosted for free, Github is a no brainer for those who use Git as their SCM solution.
  7. Vitamin - Usually a good resource for a broad range of web development related content.
  8. The Daily WTF - What ever you do, make sure you're never doing anything ridiculed on this site.
  9. Lambda the Ultimate - This blog isn't specific to a one programming language or topic over another but it covers a broad range of programming languages and developments, issue and best practices related to them. The forums are also good to peruse.
  10. Confreaks - With this site being more specific to the Ruby industry, this was meant to bring light to sites that offer the same service but for whatever languages/industry you're more interested in. (some other notable sites in this category are Google Video and Omnisio)
  11. Webmonkey - Resuscitated after being killed off a few years ago, Webmonkey is a good place to go for more technical tutorials, a decent blog and quite a few cheat sheets.
  12. Google's Testing Blog - Because we should all be doing it...testing that is.
  13. Google's Code Blog - Good source of good content from a big company full of smart people.
  14. Nettuts - A lot of decent content covering a broad range of topics. From PHP to iPhone developing (nothing to specific there of course, thanks to the nda), they'll occasionally throws interviews into the mix.
  15. DZone - A more focused and more cluttered digg-like site. A good way to find new sources of decent content.
  16. Coding Horror - Entertaining blog that's update pretty consistently. Jeff Atwood (the writer) is one of the two founders (Joel Spolsky is the other) of Stack Overflow (mentioned above).
  17. Math-Blog and Ars-Mathmatica - Because it never hurts to know a little math.
  18. TechCrunch - A good way to find out what's going on with the business side of the internet. If you're thinking of starting your own company, it's always good to check TechCrunch (and CrunchBase) to see if you have any competition and to see how they compare.
Did i miss anything?

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