Keeping up with trends in the fast-paced world of technology is challenging. I might be dating myself, but I remember a time before there was a difference between front-end and back-end coders. Now, there is so much technology it makes little sense to try to keep up with everything.
DevOps and systems folks have less of a need to keep up with the day-to-day doings of front-end work. The inverse applies to front-end folks. Both disciplines are equally difficult to master, and to excel in either one requires an enormous amount of self-discipline. Regardless of what discipline you follow, it helps to stay current. Being well-read means reading long-form pieces as well as short-form ones such as blogs, newsletters, and occasionally social media posts.
16 must-read sources from the DevOps sphere
Techmeme — I turn to Techmeme for day-to-day general technology news. It's a very well-done site that mixes AI with curation in a way that provides the most possible information in the headlines; you know what you're about to read before you read it. "Techmeme has become the technology news site of record for people both within and beyond the industry." I highly recommend Techmeme.
DevOps'ish — A shameless plug here for my own newsletter. DevOps'ish covers DevOps, cloud-native, and open source news from a variety of sources. People have told me that they turn to DevOps'ish to figure out what they should read that week to keep up with their interests. If you read everything in the newsletter every week, you might want to lay off the caffeine.
KubeWeekly — The official Kubernetes newsletter, KubeWeekly aggregates "all interesting weekly news about Kubernetes."
Last Week in AWS — Hands down, bar none, my favorite newsletter. Keeping up with AWS happenings is not achievable for mere mortals. "Less fog. More cloud. A weekly roundup of news from Amazon's cloud ecosystem—sprinkled with snark." No one covers cloud better than Corey Quinn.
The New Stack — "The New Stack is about the services and infrastructures that developers build and the cultural impact that has on the way we work and live." The New Stack covers a broad range of technology via multiple mediums. The newsletter keeps you up to date with plenty of high-quality content.
Google Cloud Platform Blog — For being a product blog that covers "product updates, customer stories, and tips and tricks on Google Cloud Platform," this can be a good source of vendor-agnostic information. A must-read if you're on GCP; a should-read if you're not.
DevOps Dispatch — The DevOps Dispatch is a weekly, curated by fellow DevOps protagonist Matty Straton. DevOps Dispatch covers the DevOps happenings well and throws in CFPs, so it is a must-read for anyone on the speaking circuit as well.
Devops Weekly — The OG of DevOps newsletters, Devops Weekly is the product of Gareth Rushgrove. For almost 400 weeks now, Gareth has put together a very digestible weekly DevOps newsletter that always delivers great content. A must-read.
SRE Weekly — The lines between DevOps and SRE are blurry at best. "SRE Weekly is a newsletter devoted to everything related to keeping a site or service available as consistently as possible." You can learn a lot from this newsletter.
appops reloaded — Michael Hausenblas' newsletter covers "all things containers, Kubernetes, Docker, Go, Linux, DevOps, cloud native apps, CI/CD, microservices, AWS, Azure, GCP." It's quite good at it, too.
O’Reilly Newsletters — I recommend the Systems Engineering and Operations newsletter, as well as the Programming and Security newsletters. Whatever sector or specialty you are in, you can't go wrong with any of the O'Reilly newsletters.
Security Newsletter — Don't let the simple name fool you: Dieter Van der Stock's Security Newsletter does an amazing job of keeping its readers up to date on the latest security issues and happenings. This is my go-to InfoSec newsletter.
5 Ally Actions — "For people who want to be better allies for women and underrepresented minorities in tech. Each week, we share 5 simple actions to take to create a more inclusive workplace." Subscribe, you'll be a better person for it.
Monitoring Weekly — Monitoring infrastructure is hard. If it were easy, we wouldn't need a newsletter dedicated to it. Monitor this to stay up to date with happenings in the world of monitoring.
Infrastructure as a Newsletter — Digital Ocean's excellent newsletter provides a lot of useful how-to's along with the latest happenings on Digital Ocean.
Opensource.com Highlights — If you're reading this article, you should probably subscribe to Opensource.com Highlights for the latest and greatest from the wonderful folks here!
[See our related story, How to build a business case for DevOps transformation.]
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