5 of Our Favorite Blogs

Writing apps and tweets isn’t all we do here at Lickability. We also love discovering new independent writers and following their blogs in RSS and on Twitter. I recently asked the team for some recommendations to add to my feed reader and shared some of my own. Here are the blogs we can’t get enough of:

NSHipster

Almost every iOS engineer at the company mentioned reading NSHipster. Now that the site’s founder, Mattt Thompson, is back at the helm and publishing regularly, we’re re-energized and excited to learn obscure Cocoa and Swift APIs, answer trivia questions (some of us even won first place at an NSHipster Pub trivia night a few yeas ago), and find ways to apply that new knowledge to our work.

Favorite past topics include NSLinguistic​Tagger, UIKey​Command, and Void.

Uses This

One of my personal favorites, Uses This (née The Setup), by Daniel Brogan, is a long-running interview series with curious nerds, creatives, and hackers about the software and hardware they use to get their job done. It’s fascinating to get a window into the obsessive and eccentric workspaces of the people we admire and how they use those tools to do what they do.

Some interviewees and setups we loved: Sara Mauskopf, Karlee Esmailli, and Stephen Hackett.

Swift Talk

Video blogs count as blogs, right? Michael Amundsen, one of our engineers, loves watching Chris Eidhof and Florian Kugler dive into complex architectural challenges and come out on the other side with elegant solutions in Swift. It costs $15 a month to subscribe (half of their videos are available for free), but it’s well worth it if you learn best by watching and want to master the craft.

Laura Hogan

Laura Hogan’s blog about management, inclusion, and um donuts, is a fairly new discovery to me, but I devour every post as it arrives in Reeder. As a coach and consultant, with experience leading teams at Etsy and Kickstarter, Laura writes about technical management in one of the clearest and most empathetic ways I’ve ever seen. It’s a must read if you manage people.

We’re also basing our internal test-device lab on some early work that she and Destiny Montague did during their time at Etsy! Thanks Laura 🙏

Khanlou

Our friend and frequent collaborator, Soroush Khanlou, writes a well-loved blog at his personal domain that focuses more on architecture and design patterns than the kind of specific snippets of code you might find on Stack Overflow. His posts push us to think deeply and often spring to mind as we were solving particularly thorny problems. He’s also inspired us to publish more ourselves.

Posts like Graduation, Refactoring Reveals Truth, and State Negotiations really stuck with us.

That’s all for now! The blogs we come back to over and over again are the ones that challenge us to look critically about our work and our workflows. They lean a bit technical, but their writing is anything but dry.