Top 100 Blogs for Developers (Q4 2008)

Note: The newest edition of this list is available here!

What defines the popularity of a blog? The ranking by Google? Traffic statistics? Feed subscriptions? Feedback from readers? Links from other sites and blogs? The answer is of course… All of them!

But, isn’t it a lot of work to find and check all statistics for all blogs? Well, the answer to that is… Yes! So be glad that I did it for you!

This is the new edition of the Top 100 Blogs for Developers. My list is based on a weighed average of each blog’s Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati Authority, RSSMicro FeedRank, Google hits, and blog comments. (I also intended to include ego size, but I figured that would give my own blog an unfair advantage.)

Please, don’t scroll down yet! First, some important comments:

• The previous (and first) edition was called Top 100 Blogs for Development Managers. This created some confusion as most blogs in the list are clearly meant to be read by developers. So I simplified the name of the list. BUT… I want to make it clear that the list is meant to cover software development in a broad sense, which includes project management, process improvement, agile development, requirements, design, coding and testing. (The stuff every manager should be interested in.) This list is not meant for blogs that deal exclusively with Ubuntu 8, Silverlight 3, Jabberwocky 5, or any other specific technologies. Sorry guys, I don’t read those.
• Despite some feeble attempts, I am not omnipotent and all-knowing. This means there are blogs out there that I (still) don’t know about. I must rely on people sending me URL’s, or I must stumble upon them myself. Of the 23 new blogs appearing in this edition, most didn’t participate last time, because they were unknown to me.
• I disqualified some blogs because their authors failed to publish new content, or they didn’t publish anything related to software development. The lazy bastards. I show no mercy.
• The calculation method for this edition was significantly improved. And I also included a new statistic that didn’t yet exist last time (FeedRank). This means that comparing these results with those of the previous edition is not entirely fair. In fact, the results are now almost actually reliable!

Oh, and another thing: I tracked the time I spent creating this thing. It added up to a staggering four full days of researching blogs, checking statistics, and performing calculations. Don’t get me wrong, I liked (almost) every minute of it. But, given the fact that I’m giving these results away for free, I hope you now feel motivated enough to a) subscribe to my blog; b) follow me on Twitter; or c) submit this article to Digg, Reddit, DZone, or whatever.

Enjoy reading!

Do you seek more advice for Software Developers, Team Leaders & Development Managers? 

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Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders

I appreciate any references to blogs that I might have missed, so I can include them in the next edition in three months.

Do you seek more advice for Software Developers, Team Leaders & Development Managers? 

Get the book!

Management 3.0

Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders

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My new book Managing for Happiness is available from June 2016.