Podcasts and blogs I’m following in early 2026

As part of the new year, I’m going through my feed readers for podcasts and blogs. This is mostly a cleanup exercise to remove sources that I regularly skip, but I’m also adding in a few feeds for sites that I find myself regularly clicking on in social media. As part of this, I figured I’d share the sources that made the cut to stick around.

You’ll notice that there are a lot of podcasts in this post! With two golden doodles in the family, I spend a lot of time on dog walks, not to mention doing chores around the house. Because of this, it’s often a lot easier for me to listen to content than read it, and indeed I often find myself feeding long-form text articles into ElevenReader so that I can listen to those items too.

Nerd notes:

• I self-host FreshRSS to aggregate written blog feeds and read them using Reeder. FreshRSS is hosted on a private VPS that I access via Tailscale on my various devices, because I’m really the only person that needs to access it.
• I listen to podcasts via Overcast, which I prefer for its audio features to the default Apple Podcasts app.
• This is not 100% complete as there are some blogs I follow purely through the Patreon site, and I haven’t (yet) taken the time to go through that and add them to this list.
• There are a few NSFW items left out intentionally, as my voice on this blog is at least semi-professional

Computing-related

Podcasts:

• Oxide and Friends is a weekly live show recorded by Bryan Cantrill, Adam Leventhal, and friends from the Oxide Computer Company. Despite being a “corporate” podcast, it generally has the vibe of “Car Talk for Computers” and can often dig into really interesting computer systems topics, and even computer and industry history. Some of the episodes get into specifics of the Oxide product, which may be interesting or skip-able depending on your interests.
• Fork Around and Find Out is a resurrection of the Ship It! podcast that used to be part of the Changelog network, focused on production systems, on-call, and large-scale engineering. The updates are a bit irregular but Justin and Autumn are enjoyable hosts to listen to.
• This is Fine! is a podcast on resilience engineering from Colette Alexander and Clint Byrum. It sometimes picks up topics from discussions in the Resilience in Software Foundation Slack instance and is almost always a fun listen.
• The Important Thing is an occasional discussion podcast between Michael Lopp and Lyle Troxell. Often very random, with widely varying episode lengths, it’s nicely chatty and a great listen during dog walks.
• Signals and Threads, from Jane Street, is another occasional podcast but often gets very deep into interesting software topics such as performance analysis, state machine replication, and memory management — with a focus on low-latency trading systems that have interesting constraints.
• The Changelog is a long-standing general software news podcast. I dip in and out of this one based on the topic being covered, and often like their “Changelog and Friends” chatty episodes more than the news or interview episodes.
• The Compute Architecture Podcast updates very infrequently but often has interesting, hardware- or systems-focused interviews.

Personal blogs:

• Charity Majors is a long-time follow of mine for her technical work on observability, her practical SRE/sysadmin mentality, and her useful perspectives on engineering management.
• Brendan Gregg posts infrequently, but will publish fascinating deep dives on performance engineering that are always worth reading.
• Chris Siebenmann is a sysadmin at the University of Toronto and a prolific blogger about nuts-and-bolts Linux admin topics. He publishes a ton so I dip in and out of his feed, but always keep it in my feed reader.
• Cat Hicks does psychological research on software teams and I always learn a ton from her writing.
• Soatok writes excellent, interesting, and opinionated articles on security and cryptography topics.
• Fred Hebert is an SRE with a strong interest in resilience engineering who frequently discusses interesting academic research on resilience and human factors.
• Glenn Lockwood is an HPC engineer who I’ve known online for a long time, and who came into the field from materials science in a similar manner to me. He’s worked at SDSC, NERSC, Microsoft, and VAST, and his annual recap of the SuperComputing conference is worth reading every year. (So is the rest of his blog!)
• Sean Goedecke is a software engineer at Github who writes interesting work on AI and on the dynamics of large companies.
• Simon Willison is one of the most essential bloggers on AI and LLMs today, not to mention incredibly prolific. His style of writing short posts on whatever he’s thinking about is one I hope to emulate more often here!
• Rachel Kroll, aka Rachel By the Bay, is a long-time sysadmin/SRE who writes on detailed sysadmin and software engineering topics in an often-ironic fashion.
• Xe Iaso is a software engineer and author of the Anubis Web AI Firewall tool. Xer blog covers a wide variety of software, systems, and AI work.
  

Technical blogs and industry news:

• LWN is the definitive source for Linux and free software news, and is supported by the community via subscriptions. You should subscribe!
• Chips and Cheese does really interesting deep dives into chip architecture and performance, often focused on newer products but occasionally digging into older hardware.
• SemiAnalysis is at this point one of the most essential news sources for the semiconducting industry, and one of the few paid sources I follow.
• Jepsen performs detailed analyses of distributed systems reliability and consistency by Kyle Kingsbury, both as consulting engagements and for the community. Read all of these, they’re excellent!
• Semiconductor Engineering is one of the long-standing industry news sites. I don’t read a ton of this but I do keep an eye on the feed for interesting headlines.
• Similarly, Data Center Dynamics is one of the standard industry news sites for data centers.

News and Politics

Podcasts:

• The Lawfare Podcast covers a really wide variety of national security law topics. My only regular listen is their Rational Security episodes which provide a weekly roundup of relevant news in an informal discussion format, but I dip in and out of the others.
• Money Stuff is a fun weekly podcast from Matt Levine and Katie Greifeld of Bloomberg News, who discuss weekly financial news from a very nerdy perspective. I’m not generally a huge finance person, but I like that this podcast allows me to listen in to people geeking out about the topic.
• The World in Brief from the Economist is their daily quick summary of the news. I have very mixed feelings about the Economist in general — as with many British sources, they platform far too much transphobia — but I have yet to find a better substitute for “quick morning summary of the news”. At least, nothing else that doesn’t make me want to throw my phone at a wall.

Blogs and News:

• Rest of World covers tech industry news with a focus on impacts outside the West, and often has really interesting coverage from a different angle.
• Liberal Currents is a political blog focused on liberalism, both in current events and as a political philosophy, and has published a lot of excellent pieces since I started reading it in 2025.

Miscellaneous

Podcasts:

• Arms Control Wonk continues to be a good listen, though it’s updated something sporadically the past few years. The coverage of nuclear weapons, missiles and other delivery systems, and current events around arms control (or lack thereof) is very good. If you sponsor them via Patreon, their Slack instance is also a fascinating discussion forum, though I only dip in and out of it occasionally.
• The Culture Study Podcast by Anne Helen Petersen features conversations between Anne and a guest and focuses on listener Q&A. It often covers culture topics that I otherwise don’t get much of through other feeds. For example, recent episodes have talked about anything from birding to K-pop to the anatomy of cultural panics. I don’t listen to every episode, but they’re often quite fun.
• Neon Liberalism is a regular podcast from Liberal Currents. I might put this in the News category except that it often digs into political topics from a historical or theoretical perspective rather than just focusing on current events.
• Similarly, Reimagining Liberty from Aaron Ross Powell digs into political theory and current events from the perspective of Powell’s particular strain of libertarian-ism, which is much more in conversation with modern liberalism and anarchism vs more right-wing strains.

Personal blogs:

• Phil Broughton is a health physicist at UC Berkeley who has worked in classified nuclear work at LLNL as well as spending a year in Alaska, and has a wealth of fascinating and hilarious stories.
• Lois McMaster Bujold is one of my favorite science fiction and fantasy authors. While she’s semi-retired, she still writes occasional novellas following Penric, a sorcerer in her World of the Five Gods, which I really love. Her blog helpfully announces new stories!
• John Scalzi is another favorite author, and also has an excellent blog called Whatever.
• Bret Devereaux writes A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry about history, the military, and pop culture. If you’re interested in an extensive deep dive into the military missteps made Saruman in The Two Towers, this is the blog for you!
• Bits About Money is Patrick McKenzie’s blog about finance, and each entry tends to be a highly-nerdy deep dive about how some interesting corner of the financial system works.

Webcomics:

• The Order of the Stick is a long-running D&D stick-figure comic that I have been reading for longer than I can really say. I highly recommend it, though I’ll warn you that with an archive of >1,300 comics (and growing!) you are likely to lose a lot of time this way.
• Questionable Content is a slice-of-life comic about a coffee shop… with robots, super-intelligent AIs, stupid dick jokes, and more. Also has a long archive to dig through.
• Girl Genius is a long-running online comic book about “Adventure, Romance, and MAD SCIENCE!” and thoroughly excellent.