What newsletters are you subscribed to?

#discuss #learning #newsletters

Michael Kohl Jul 12, 2018 ・1 min read

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.

Michael Kohl • Jul 12 '18

If I want to know something, I find the information myself

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.

Ben Sinclair • Jul 12 '18

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.

Michael Kohl • Jul 13 '18

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.

guico33 • Apr 21 '19

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.

ItsASine (Kayla) • Jul 12 '18

💯

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.

Jonathan Lacanlale • Jul 13 '18

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

Massimo Artizzu • Jul 12 '18 • Edited

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.

John Forstmeier • Jul 12 '18

I officially subscribe to two:

Golang Weekly: it's a super clean/simple layout and I'm personally most interested in the articles discussing best practices and neat solutions (Cheney is often featured here and his stuff is awesome) - definitely my favorite thing on Thursdays.
Axios Login: more to appease the news junkie in me with a broader technology sector focus.

Non-newsletter sources I use heavily are Twitter (both for news and for neat tech stuff) and Sip by Product Hunt for random news updates throughout the day.

Bruno Paz • Feb 3 '19

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:

matt24ray • Jul 12 '18

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.

Gerade Geldenhuys • Jul 12 '18

I subscribe to Steve Smith's Weekly dev tips

Only one, but a goodie.

Ben Hilburn • Jul 13 '18

A couple I subscribe to and enjoy:

hackernewsletter - I don't care to browse HackerNews (especially the comment sections), but I do like seeing the links that get posted. This newsletter does exactly that.
NextDraft - A daily round-up of the news that is well-done, easy to browse, and enjoyable to read.