I'm just curious which newsletters people on here are subscribed to, both work related and private. Here are mine:
- WebOps Weekly
- Ruby Weekly
- JavaScript Weekly
- Frontend Focus
- ElixirWeekly
- Elixir Radar
- Crystal Weekly
- O'Reilly Programming Newsletter: A bit of everything
- raywenderlich.com Weekly: iOS, Android and Unity tutorials
- SoftwareLeadWeekly: People, culture and leadership
- Farnam Street's Brain Food Newsletter: "Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out."
- Exponential View: "Azeem Azhar's wondermissive on technology, business & society."
- Smart News For Humans: My friend and CTO/leadership mentor Matt writes about ethics in AI/ML and how to avoid dystopian futures.
Discussion (22)
I never subscribe to newsletters. They've just never interested me. If I want to know something, I find the information myself, rather than get it pushed to me. Newsletters are usually just filler - 10% something I am interested in but would have read anyway, 90% irrelevant waffle.
I am on the mailing lists of all the artists I've supported on bandcamp, so I get notifications of their new releases, however if they provided a feed of these separate to the general timeline on the site, I'd unsubscribe.
You can only look for what you know exists though. For me this is also a lot about learning/discovering new things. Obviously I don't really read 15 newsletters per week, I mostly just skim them and open anywhere between 0-5 articles, many of which I only read the first and last paragraph of before deciding if they are interesting enough to read all of it.
I find out about things from browsing sites and using Twitter and Reddit, things like that.
Newsletters are just a different way of doing things, but I've never got the appeal of having someone send me curated content.
Fair point, I was the same until last year. But as my role shifted from individual contributor to CTO, I also needed to stay up to date with things that aren't part of my core competencies/interests and for that the curated content worked well. I have them skip the inbox and go straight to a specific folder, so instead of Twitter and Reddit I browse that.
💯
If it's tech news, I'll find it organically on reddit or here when I'm sitting down to read tech news. If it's tips and tricks, I'll find it Googling when I need to know something. Either way, I initiate the search rather than increase the clutter in my inbox.
I'm still trying to get rid of newsletters that seem to be cool with subscribing instantly with flimsy concent while also taking a month to remove you from the list when you want out.
As mentioned, newsletter are more for discovering, not learning about something you already know.
I also browse reddit, medium, dev and a few other channels, but it's time-consuming and interesting content is scarce.
I subscribe to a couple of newsletters and the signal to noise ratio is much lower.
For someone who is actually busy, I think newsletters are a good way to stay up-to-date with minimal time investment.
Vault Analytics has an awesome newsletter of everything AI and ML related! Sometimes mind-blowing tech gets overshadowed by other mind-blowing tech and their coverage makes sure to keep it all in one email
Only two, because there's no other way:
For the rest, I'd rather use a RSS feed. Feedly keeps them well organized, and away from my inbox.
Thanks for the list! There are a couple I hadn't seen before. I help make the DailyDrip Weekly Newsletter (dailydrip.com/weekly). I also sub to Inside Dev (inside.com/dev), which I've enjoyed a lot lately.
I am also a big fan of tech related newsletters.
For me, what attracts most on these kind of newsletters is that I can get an overview of whats going on the industry pretty quickly and sometimes it acts as a reminder that I need to check this or that.
Here are some I am subscribed to:
I subscribe to Steve Smith's Weekly dev tips
Only one, but a goodie.
I start my day from Daily Brew
I would add the "you are not so smart" podcast which is all about how our brains work and why people and crowds behave as they do.
The ones I always read are JS Weekly, @cassidoo 's newsletter, and (non-tech) Girls Night In
I subscribe to both of those! I may not be in the target GNI demographic but I enjoy it. 🙂
I like twitter but when I'm bored I look at Code Project (they do a newsletter but I don't subscribe): codeproject.com/script/News/List.aspx
Ponyfoo is one of the best weekly developer newsletters and the only one I subscribe to. It's great.
Andy Croll's One Ruby Thing is very good onerubything.com
For me it's:
I wish there was something as "Backend focus" or "PHP focus" or "Laravel focus"