Top 100 Blogs for Development Managers (Q3 2008)

Note: This is an OLD post. There is a NEW version of this list available. You can find it here...

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.)

Nr	Site / Author	PR	TA	AR	Hits	Cmts
1	Joel on Software Joel Spolsky	7	2357	40364	6090
2	Coding Horror Jeff Atwood	6	3472	54474	3870	1916
3	Seth's Blog Seth Godin	7	8757	93669	14600
4	Paul Graham: Essays Paul Graham	6	2382	49839	2750
5	blog.pmarca.com Marc Andreesen	7	1169	95439	3350
6	Rough Type Nicholas Carr	7	1114	109196	4910	111
7	Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen Scott Hanselman	5	1284	51568	4040	155
8	Martin Fowler's Bliki Martin Fowler	6	376	79142	2240
9	Rands in Repose Michael Lopp	6	565	199191	1610	401
10	Stevey's Blog Rants Steve Yegge	7	182	201319	1270	912
11	Bokardo: Social Design Joshua Porter	6	448	105072	1990	122
12	Eric.Weblog() Eric Sink	6	161	219875	1820	183
13	Lambda the Ultimate (various)	6	197	172624	2150	90
14	Otaku, Cedric's Weblog Cedric	7	107	209562	942	274
15	PragDave Dave Thomas	6	56		1700	158
16	High Scalability (various)	6	611	67614	749	57
17	The Berkun Blog Scott Berkun	6	224	150787	1120	42
18	UIE Brain Sparks Jared Spool	6	128	73839	913	34
19	Raganwald Reginald Braithwaite	5	286	295168	591	120
20	J.D. Meier's Blog J.D. Meier	6	106		446	32
21	Stack Overflow Jeff Atwood	6	234	99548	119	292
22	Stevenf.com Steven Frank	5	211	431730	711
23	secretGeek Leon Bambrick	5	109	279144	382	78
24	CodeBetter.Com (various)	5	804	55474	140	53
25	Interoperability Happens Ted Neward	6	155	871230	570	42
26	Gray's Matter Justice Gray	5	89	302785	607	38
27	Mike Cohn's Blog: Succeeding with Agile Mike Cohn	5		401141	264	116
28	Object Mentor Blog (various)	5	83	281113	248	84
29	James Bach’s Blog James Bach	5	45	657727	503	159
30	Managing Product Development Johanna Rothman	6	50	710781	1020	22
31	Google Testing Blog (various)	5	151	308629	216	45
32	Alistair Cockburn Alistair Cockburn	5		636969	426
33	Tyner Blain Scott Sehlhorst	5	63	873747	594	40
34	Artima Weblogs (various)	5	250	41092	97	21
35	It's Just a Bunch of Stuff That Happens Eric Burke	5	401	338795	109	51
36	{ |one, step, back| } Jim Weirich	5	92	699777	315
37	Dr. Dobb's CodeTalk (various)	6		249123	732	6
38	Petzold Book Blog Charles Petzold	5	23	400444	362	67
39	{Codesqueeze} Max Pool	5	77	432030	172	56
40	Signal vs. Noise (various)	4		72462	211	220
41	Curious Cat John Hunter	5	44	96174	1030	4
42	Knowing.NET Larry O'Brien	5	48	601544	482	12
43	Agile Management Blog David Anderson	5	26	655893	1200	15
44	/\ndy Andy Hunt	6	28	1717994	769	21
45	James Shore: Successful Software James Shore	5	71	1331837	221	28
46	Object Technology Jeff Sutherland	6	85	500221	186	6
47	Better Projects Craig Brown	5	38	1080915	251	21
48	Evolving Web Jim Benson	5	42	1681730	708	16
49	Meme Agora Neal Ford	5	63	2160111	247	28
50	Agility@Scale Scott W. Ambler	5			70	68
51	David Chelimsky David Chelimsky	5		838069	103	62
52	Pure Danger Tech Alex Miller	5	70	596549	163	9
53	Elegant Code (various)	5	96	497139	72	18
54	Exploring Solutions Spaces C. Keith Ray	6	13	1392656	329
55	The Braidy Tester Micahel	5	21		344	9
56	Destraynor Des Traynor	5	16	966603	169	58
57	Project Shrink Bas de Baar	4	40	141635	237	18
58	Stephans Blog Stephan Schmidt	5	32	659770	56	87
59	Agile Advice (various)	5	64	899353	339	2
60	LeadingAnswers Mike Griffiths	4	38	1254375	456	30
61	Wide Awake Developers Michael Nygard	5	292	1072770	149	4
62	Bit-Player Brian Hayes	6	12	3504554	240	65
63	Word Aligned Thomas Guest	5	57	536114	43	21
64	Testing Hotlist Update Bret Pettichord	5	14	1409810	231	29
65	NOOP.NL: Managing Software Development Jurgen Appelo	4	73	692206	181	19
66	Caffeinated Coder Russell Ball	5	52	1558998	46	86
67	GrokCode Jess	4	109	524914	46	74
68	Lean Software Engineering Corey Ladas	4	42	1112902	322	19
69	Exploration Through Example Brian Marick	5	31	3491602	224	27
70	Herding Cats Glen Alleman	5	51	1434425	70	23
71	Legends of the Sun Pig Martin Sutherland	7	4	1453763	399	14
72	Agile Developer Venkat's Blog Venkat Subramaniam	5	34	1152021	187	9
73	The Third Bit Esan	5	44	1084414	321	1
74	Implementing Scrum Mike Vizdos	5	53	946336	206	3
75	Collaborative Software Testing Jonathan Kohl	5	26	3279595	296
76	Test Obsessed Elisabeth Hendrickson	4	34	2117127	256	41
77	10x Software Development Steve McConnell	4	0		533	108
78	Joel Pobar's Weblog Joel Pobar	5	21	6854408	139	94
79	Creative Chaos Matthew Heusser	5	28	3038531	294	11
80	Jcooney.NET Joseph Cooney	5	33	2194958	161	15
81	All About Agile Kelly Waters	4	31	408534	223	10
82	Project Management 2.0 Andrew Filev	5	12		272	5
83	Agile Commons (various)	5		686263	148	4
84	The Cutter Blog (various)	5	6	778348	304	7
85	Chris Spagnuolo's GeoScrum Chris Spagnuolo	5	51	2259995	198	4
86	Aligning Technology, Strategy, People & Projects Eric Brown	4	44	1245105	206	12
87	Agile Software Development (various)	4	62	331003	100	7
88	Clarke Ching - More Chilli Please Clarke Ching	5	36	2456889	280	3
89	Musings of a Software Development Manager Ed Gibbs	4	11	1538525	252	29
90	Notes from a Tool User Mark Levison	4	23	1383460	134	24
91	Silk and Spinach Kevin Rutherford	5	9	1117088	121	14
92	Focused Performance Frank Patrick	4	7	729258	1140	6
93	Hot Needle of Inquiry Ron Jeffries	4	11	273831	694	0
94	Mistaeks I Hav Made Nat Pryce	5	18	187328	94	0
95	Agile Thoughts Tobias Mayer	4	21	1782189	80	101
96	Agile Chronicles (various)	5		2680922	131	9
97	Steve Rowe's Blog Steve Rowe	4	20		119	20
98	Kevin Dente's Blog Kevin Dente	4	22		40	92
99	Agile CMMI Blog Hillel Glazer	5	8	3340384	164	12
100	Andrew Tokeley Andrew Tokeley	4	28	1348226	64	20
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...
101	Information Technology Dark Side David Christiansen	4	41	1838236	93	16
102	Jonathan Babcock Jonathan Babcock	4	12	356837	59	14
103	Wayne Allen's Weblog Wayne Allen	4	32		82	12
104	Brad Appleton's ACME Blog Brad Appleton	4	19	2819226	505	5
105	Agile in Action Simon Baker	4	32	1866089	116	10
106	Red Squirrel Reflections Dave Hoover	5	8	2332736	106
107	You'd think with all my video game experience... Jason Yip	5	21	5287734	195	2
108	PierG Piergiorgio Grossi	5	8	3549551	113	9
109	Raven's Brain Raven Young	4	44	5041095	342	0
110	Software Project Management Pawel Brodzinski	4	23	1694265	95	8
111	HTMList.com (various)	3	18	395560	53	19
112	Effective Software Development Dave Nicolette	4	18		184	1
113	Jeff Patton's Holistic Product Design & Development Jeff Patton	4		1391393	92
114	I.M. Wright’s “Hard Code” Eric Brechner	4	0		66	51
115	/var/log/mind Dhananjay Nene	2	13	676449	6	94
116	George Dinwiddie's Blog George Dinwiddie	4	11	6163238	123	16
117	Agile Software Process Improvement Jason Gorman	4	20	865398	75	0
118	Thoughts On... William Caputo	4	13	4397849	113	5
119	Cauvin Roger L. Cauvin	4	7	2583163	98	8
120	You Want IT When? Bill Miller	4		2039808	57	7
121	Steve Freeman Steve Freeman	4	12	5584864	45	19
122	Jbrains.ca J.B. Rainsberger	5	0	15073372	117
123	Leading Agile Mike Cottmeyer	3	10	4452233	125	6
124	Corporate Coder Eric Landes	4	2		60	2
125	Ivar Jacobson's Blog Ivar Jacobson	3	3	16938712	42	17

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:

 

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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