As required in the assignment, here is a list of some cool blogs that I think are worth checking out. In no particular order:
1. The Quest for Tetris
I’m not going to pretend that I understand half of the technical details, but this is quite the epic quest. A few years ago, someone posted a challenge on the Code Golf Stack Exchange to build a program to play Tetris…in Conway’s game of life. After years of hard work, a team of experts finally cracked it…by implementing an entire computer with cellular automata. This blog documents the technical marvel that is the final computer.
2. Project Zero
Project Zero’s blog is certainly not for the faint of heart. They go into a lot of detail on vulnerabilities discovered by Google’s Project Zero team (basically a bunch of people who get paid to find vulnerabilities in just about anything). A lot of the exploits that they find are extremely cutting-edge (e.g. Meltdown).
3. Random ASCII
This is an interesting blog by one Bruce Dawson, who describes himself as a programmer working at Google on Chrome for Windows. It’s mostly a bunch of miscellaneous tech topics. What could be more interesting than watching a Google guy ride to work on an off-road unicycle?
4. Joel on Software
I highly recommend this blog, which happens to be written by the co-founder of Stack Overflow. The posts date back to 1999 and mostly feature miscellaneous software development stuff. Unlike the blogs listed above, Joel has a very clear writing style; he manages to go in-depth with his topics while still being perfectly accessible, even if your programming experience is pretty much limited to CoPE.
5. Moxie Marlinspike
Okay, that’s not his real name, but his website (which includes a blog) is pretty cool. He used to be head of security at Twitter and is extremely well-known in the computer security world. He’s also an ardent anarchist who sails and train-hops (or at least did at one point). I actually haven’t pursued his blog much, but the “stories” on his website are really cool.
Does XKCD count as a blog? They’re (usually) pretty funny.
Update, as I reach the end of my senior year (and the impending death of this blog, since I’m probably not motivated enough to continue it outside of class):
It’s not a blog, but I cannot recommend highly enough the essays on Paul Graham’s website. (Paul Graham happens to be the co-founder of Y Combinator, if that piques your interest.) A lot of his essays are about startup stuff, some of them are about various technical facets of Lisp, and some of them are quite literally among the best essays I’ve ever read. (Although, to be fair, I don’t read that many essays anyway.)
(While we’re on the topic of interesting sites to check out, I can also recommend perusing the quote collection at Cat-V. Great stuff.)