I do my best to try and keep, if not abreast of, then at least aware of what’s going on in the world of data. That includes RDBMS, Event streaming, stream processing, open source data projects, data engineering, object storage, and more. If you’re interested in the same, then you might find this blog useful, because I’m sharing my sources :)
Sidenote: allow me some nostalgia
In the really old days not that many people blogged. It was kinda weird. There’d be a handful of folk in your circle of interest who also blogged, and you’d maybe have a Blogroll linking out to their blogs and/or feeds.
In the old days, a bit after that, more people started blogging, and one had to be organised about following what was written. The fantastic technology that is RSS came about. I used Google Reader (RIP) and followed a ton of blogs. Then Google Reader was infamously killed off, and I switched to Feedly. Then I…dunno. I moved jobs, I didn’t have time, I made excuses, whatever. I stopped following blogs so closely, and instead got my current tech news from Twitter and from colleagues. This was all about seven years ago, and I even wrote about it.
In that time, probably around the late 2010’s, RSS started to fade. <RANT> This is to my eternal horror, and an illustration of the enshittification of the internet. Instead of having an easy way to share material openly using an standard and open format that people could consume with whatever platform or tool they wanted, a bunch of smart people wanting to make money off other people’s content decided it was far more sensible to put up walls. Instead of being able to pull a set of RSS feeds into one place, the reader would instead traipse around numerous platforms to read the material there. Eyeballs, amirite? That, plus a lively tech twitter scene and some clever algorithms meant that folk got their fill of tech news directly. It might have been from blogs, but often direct linked instead of from an RSS feed being followed. </RANT>
Fast-forward to today, and I’m back with a centrally managed RSS feed—and it’s working great 😃
RSS is dead…long live RSS! (All Hail Inoreader)
I’m using an excellent RSS reader called Inoreader. I spent a bunch of time last year looking at options and settled on this one. It’s got some really nice features on top of simply collecting RSS feeds and organising them into folders including:
Web scraping for blogs that don’t offer RSS (grrrr)—usually does a half decent job of telling you when there’s a new article to read
Newsletter subscriptions (get a bespoke email; newsletters sent to that address show up in your feed)
Share articles to lots of services plus custom integrations
Search across feeds
Feed filters and rules
Create custom RSS feeds from your folders
Load full content (even if the payload isn’t in the RSS feed itself)
There’s a free plan—I pay for the pro one because it’s worth it and I like supporting good projects.
So…where are these blogs then?
Here’s the OPML for all the blogs that I follow at the moment.
My RSS feeds are skewed towards my interest in the data industry—streaming, analytics, data engineering, RDBMS. And just to make it fun it’s got some general tech feeds (HackerNews, Lobste.rs), some podcasts, and some running blogs too. Cos, it’s mine and I curate it :-P
The feeds are split into folders of roughly logical grouping. I’ve shared each one below as individual OPML—but if you want to follow along dynamically as I add (or remove) feeds from these folders, you can use the RSS feed of each.
There is also a web page view (HTML) of each folder too.
Individual folders
Aggregators
A bunch of tags of interest on Medium, Lobste.rs, plus some InfoQ feeds
Companies using data
Everyone who is building stuff with data and writing about it
Data projects & vendors
Everyone who is building products for doing stuff with data. Includes both vendors and non-profit projects.
Software
Handful of projects that I follow closely and want to see when there are new releases
Individuals & Consultancies
What it says on the tin. Bit of a broader scope on this one, sometimes just interesting people in the broader field of tech.
Forums
Apache Kafka and Apache Flink Reddit subs, plus interesting tags on StackOverflow
Marketing & DevRel
How DARE you put them in the same subheading? Well, cos there’s lots of overlap.
Podcasts
A mishmash of podcasts, covering tech, UK politics, current affairs, history, and more. Many of these are dormant, but I keep the subscription in the hope that one they they’ll come back :)
Running
Yep, no tech here. Move on, or join in 🏃♂️
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