Top 100 Blogs for Development Managers

Top 100 Blogs for Development Managers

From: http://www.noop.nl/2008/09/top-100-blogs-for-development-managers-q3-2008.html

100 Finally, it's here! The new list I've been working on for more than two weeks! This is the top 100 most popular blogs for software development managers. You might already have seen my earlier list: the Top 100 Best Software Engineering Books, Ever. Well, I'm afraid this new list was even harder to make. Please refer to the bottom of the list for my list of complaints, and why my life sucks. But first, let's have look at the results...

Note: You can download the complete OPML file containing the full top 100 list of RSS/Atom feeds, plus some bonus feeds. (You can import that file in most feed readers, like Google Reader.)

NrSite / AuthorPRTAARHitsCmts
1Joel on Software Joel Spolsky72357403646090 
2Coding Horror Jeff Atwood634725447438701916
3Seth's Blog Seth Godin787579366914600 
4Paul Graham: Essays Paul Graham62382498392750 
5blog.pmarca.com Marc Andreesen71169954393350 
6Rough Type Nicholas Carr711141091964910111
7Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen Scott Hanselman51284515684040155
8Martin Fowler's Bliki Martin Fowler6376791422240 
9Rands in Repose Michael Lopp65651991911610401
10Stevey's Blog Rants Steve Yegge71822013191270912
11Bokardo: Social Design Joshua Porter64481050721990122
12Eric.Weblog() Eric Sink61612198751820183
13Lambda the Ultimate (various)6197172624215090
14Otaku, Cedric's Weblog Cedric7107209562942274
15PragDave Dave Thomas656 1700158
16High Scalability (various)66116761474957
17The Berkun Blog Scott Berkun6224150787112042
18UIE Brain Sparks Jared Spool61287383991334
19Raganwald Reginald Braithwaite5286295168591120
20J.D. Meier's Blog J.D. Meier6106 44632
21Stack Overflow Jeff Atwood623499548119292
22Stevenf.com Steven Frank5211431730711 
23secretGeek Leon Bambrick510927914438278
24CodeBetter.Com (various)58045547414053
25Interoperability Happens Ted Neward615587123057042
26Gray's Matter Justice Gray58930278560738
27Mike Cohn's Blog: Succeeding with Agile Mike Cohn5 401141264116
28Object Mentor Blog (various)58328111324884
29James Bach’s Blog James Bach545657727503159
30Managing Product Development Johanna Rothman650710781102022
31Google Testing Blog (various)515130862921645
32Alistair Cockburn Alistair Cockburn5 636969426 
33Tyner Blain Scott Sehlhorst56387374759440
34Artima Weblogs (various)5250410929721
35It's Just a Bunch of Stuff That Happens Eric Burke540133879510951
36{ |one, step, back| } Jim Weirich592699777315 
37Dr. Dobb's CodeTalk (various)6 2491237326
38Petzold Book Blog Charles Petzold52340044436267
39{Codesqueeze} Max Pool57743203017256
40Signal vs. Noise (various)4 72462211220
41Curious Cat John Hunter5449617410304
42Knowing.NET Larry O'Brien54860154448212
43Agile Management Blog David Anderson526655893120015
44//ndy Andy Hunt628171799476921
45James Shore: Successful Software James Shore571133183722128
46Object Technology Jeff Sutherland6855002211866
47Better Projects Craig Brown538108091525121
48Evolving Web Jim Benson542168173070816
49Meme Agora Neal Ford563216011124728
50Agility@Scale Scott W. Ambler5  7068
51David Chelimsky David Chelimsky5 83806910362
52Pure Danger Tech Alex Miller5705965491639
53Elegant Code (various)5964971397218
54Exploring Solutions Spaces C. Keith Ray6131392656329 
55The Braidy Tester Micahel521 3449
56Destraynor Des Traynor51696660316958
57Project Shrink Bas de Baar44014163523718
58Stephans Blog Stephan Schmidt5326597705687
59Agile Advice (various)5648993533392
60LeadingAnswers Mike Griffiths438125437545630
61Wide Awake Developers Michael Nygard529210727701494
62Bit-Player Brian Hayes612350455424065
63Word Aligned Thomas Guest5575361144321
64Testing Hotlist Update Bret Pettichord514140981023129
65NOOP.NL: Managing Software Development Jurgen Appelo47369220618119
66Caffeinated Coder Russell Ball55215589984686
67GrokCode Jess41095249144674
68Lean Software Engineering Corey Ladas442111290232219
69Exploration Through Example Brian Marick531349160222427
70Herding Cats Glen Alleman55114344257023
71Legends of the Sun Pig Martin Sutherland74145376339914
72Agile Developer Venkat's Blog Venkat Subramaniam53411520211879
73The Third Bit Esan54410844143211
74Implementing Scrum Mike Vizdos5539463362063
75Collaborative Software Testing Jonathan Kohl5263279595296 
76Test Obsessed Elisabeth Hendrickson434211712725641
7710x Software Development Steve McConnell40 533108
78Joel Pobar's Weblog Joel Pobar521685440813994
79Creative Chaos Matthew Heusser528303853129411
80Jcooney.NET Joseph Cooney533219495816115
81All About Agile Kelly Waters43140853422310
82Project Management 2.0 Andrew Filev512 2725
83Agile Commons (various)5 6862631484
84The Cutter Blog (various)567783483047
85Chris Spagnuolo's GeoScrum Chris Spagnuolo55122599951984
86Aligning Technology, Strategy, People & Projects Eric Brown444124510520612
87Agile Software Development (various)4623310031007
88Clarke Ching - More Chilli Please Clarke Ching53624568892803
89Musings of a Software Development Manager Ed Gibbs411153852525229
90Notes from a Tool User Mark Levison423138346013424
91Silk and Spinach Kevin Rutherford59111708812114
92Focused Performance Frank Patrick4772925811406
93Hot Needle of Inquiry Ron Jeffries4112738316940
94Mistaeks I Hav Made Nat Pryce518187328940
95Agile Thoughts Tobias Mayer421178218980101
96Agile Chronicles (various)5 26809221319
97Steve Rowe's Blog Steve Rowe420 11920
98Kevin Dente's Blog Kevin Dente422 4092
99Agile CMMI Blog Hillel Glazer58334038416412
100Andrew Tokeley Andrew Tokeley42813482266420

After creating this Top 100 Blogs for Software Development Managers, I was sad to see that a number of very interesting blogs had been unable to find a slot on the big list. We're talking about a number of dear favorites of mine here! So I've selected and printed another 25 blogs, which makes this the only top 100 list in the world with 125 entries...

101Information Technology Dark Side David Christiansen44118382369316
102Jonathan Babcock Jonathan Babcock4123568375914
103Wayne Allen's Weblog Wayne Allen432 8212
104Brad Appleton's ACME Blog Brad Appleton41928192265055
105Agile in Action Simon Baker432186608911610
106Red Squirrel Reflections Dave Hoover582332736106 
107You'd think with all my video game experience... Jason Yip52152877341952
108PierG Piergiorgio Grossi5835495511139
109Raven's Brain Raven Young44450410953420
110Software Project Management Pawel Brodzinski4231694265958
111HTMList.com (various)3183955605319
112Effective Software Development Dave Nicolette418 1841
113Jeff Patton's Holistic Product Design & Development Jeff Patton4 139139392 
114I.M. Wright’s “Hard Code” Eric Brechner40 6651
115/var/log/mind Dhananjay Nene213676449694
116George Dinwiddie's Blog George Dinwiddie411616323812316
117Agile Software Process Improvement Jason Gorman420865398750
118Thoughts On... William Caputo41343978491135
119Cauvin Roger L. Cauvin472583163988
120You Want IT When? Bill Miller4 2039808577
121Steve Freeman Steve Freeman41255848644519
122Jbrains.ca J.B. Rainsberger5015073372117 
123Leading Agile Mike Cottmeyer31044522331256
124Corporate Coder Eric Landes42 602
125Ivar Jacobson's Blog Ivar Jacobson33169387124217

About the Nominations
Only blogs that were nominated are present on this top 100 list. In two earlier posts (here and here) I asked my readers to cast their votes. This resulted in 220 nominated blogs, which included a number of my own favorites. I only considered blogs that have been active in the last three months. (I see no point in wasting time on blogs that aren't even being kept up-to-date with new content.) Some nominations were discarded because I don't think they were real blogs. However, some popular personal sites were mentioned often enough to allow for a few exceptions. For example, Alistair Cockburn and Paul Graham have sites that don't follow the "standard" blog pattern. But I think some people would have flamed me terribly had I disqualified such celebrities.

The idea of this list is to promote popular blogs that are interesting to software development managers. Therefore, I ignored the blogs that did not have any (recent) content directly related to either requirements, design, coding, testing, management, process improvement or methodologies. I also discarded generic project management blogs without topics on software development practices. Likewise, I discarded the pure coding and technology blogs when they did not elevate to the level of "managing" or "ruminating about" software development. Last of all, I only considered blogs in the English language. (I had not mentioned this constraint before. But fortunately, blogs in other languages had not been submitted.)

About Statistics
The nominated blogs have been rated using five different statistics. I will describe them here:

  • Google Page Rank (PR): The page rank for each blog indicates a blog's relative importance on the Internet (by analysis of the weight of other sites linking to it). The higher the page rank, the better. You can see that only blogs with a page rank of 4 or higher have made it on the final Top 100 list.
  • Technorati Authority (TA): The authority for a blog indicates the number of other unique blogs that are linking to it. It is a simple way of determining if a blog is considered an authority within the blogosphere.
  • Alexa Rank (AR): The Alexa rank is the best available (free) measure of global traffic statistics. By comparing these rankings (where lower means better) we know which blogs have attracted more visitors.
  • Hits: The number of Google hits was used to get an indication of the number of links on the Internet.
  • Comments (Cmts): For each blog I've counted the number of comments on the last 10 blog posts. This should be an indication of the level of interaction that each blog generates with its readers.

No Feeds
I wasted a lot of time trying to find a measure of the number of RSS/Atom feeds for each blog. Unfortunately, this proved too much of a challenge. Only few blogs run their feeds through FeedBurner with a public feed count. And the number of subscribers in Google Reader appeared to be a very unreliable statistic, as it seemed to depend on the specific feed type (Atom/RSS/etc) that was selected. If anyone has a better suggestion for evaluating feed counts, please let me know! I am eager to use feed counts, not in the least because my own blog (with 900+ subscribers) seems to be doing nicely in that respect.

About Ratings
For each of the five statistics I calculated the relative scores for the good and bad performers in that specific area. Unfortunately, in some cases, the statistics were not available. Some blogs are not registered with Technorati. (Hello, Mike Cohn, Scott Ambler, and others, wake up please!) Also, when blogs are part of bigger sites, Alexa doesn't track the traffic statistics for the individual blogs, only for the entire site. Which makes the rankings pretty useless in those cases. (Artima WebLogs en CodeBetter.com are two examples of sites that host multiple blogs, but that don't support individual statistics for any of them. In these cases I simply listed the aggregated blogs as one entry on the list.) Finally, there are a number of authors that simply don't allow comments on their blogs. In each of these cases I let the blogs score "neutral" in those areas. They were not punished for lack of statistics. It turned out that each blog earned at least three scores, out of the five statistics. So I simply calculated the average of the scores that were available.

Let it be known that I don't care if people think my system sucks. In fact, I would agree wholeheartedly. But it's the best I could come up with at this time. And I believe the result is actually quite nice.

Message for Blog Authors
If your blog made it on this list, then congratulations to you! Most of you didn't even have to bribe me! For those of you who love to show off their accomplishments, I even made two very nice banners. Feel free to add either one of them to your site:

Top100banner1  Top100banner2

Message for Other Authors
I fully understand that your site should also have been on this list. Well, tough luck. I'm quite sure that I'm going to repeat this exercise again in a number of months. So next time, if you want to be on this list, do the following:

  1. Make sure it's a real blog, and not a Wiki, or a business card, or an error page.
  2. Nominate your blog, either by adding a comment to this post, or by sending me an email.
  3. Make sure that your last blog post is not dated March 11, 2006.
  4. Except for stuff about your code, your bike, and your mom, make sure there's something interesting to read for software development managers.
  5. Increase your rankings with Google, Alexa and Technorati. It helps. And discuss your posts with your readers.
  6. It might also help if I really like your blog.

My Confession
I was quite relieved to see that my own blog has acquired enough visibility to make it to #65 on my own list. The smart people among you will understand that this top 100 list is just an elaborate plot a) to get referrals to this blog post from at least 100 popular blogs; b) to increase my own feed count; and c) to increase my own ranking in the next edition of this list.

There, I admitted it. We all have our weaknesses. But I'm sure you are all just as understanding and forgiving as I am. Now let's start reading what those other 99 great blogs have to say about software development.

You can download the complete OPML file containing the full top 100 list of RSS/Atom feeds, plus some bonus feeds. (You can import that file in most feed readers, like Google Reader.)

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