Best backend engineering blogs

Best backend engineering blogs

A strong mix of company engineering blogs and individual voices covers most of what's useful in backend development:

Company engineering blogs:

• Netflix Tech Blog – Deep dives into distributed systems, streaming infrastructure, and scale.
• Uber Engineering – Strong on microservices, data infrastructure, and real-world tradeoffs.
• Stripe Engineering – Excellent writing on API design, reliability, and payments infrastructure.
• Cloudflare Blog – Great for networking, security, and low-level systems content.
• Shopify Engineering – Practical posts on scaling e-commerce infrastructure.
• Discord Engineering – Well-written posts on real-time systems and database scaling.
• AWS Architecture Blog – Useful for cloud infrastructure patterns and case studies.

Individual/independent voices:

• Martin Fowler's blog – Foundational writing on software architecture and design patterns.
• High Scalability – Curated breakdowns of how major systems are architected.
• Julia Evans (jvns.ca) – Approachable, deeply technical posts on systems, networking, and debugging.
• Brandur Leach (brandur.org) – Thoughtful writing on API design and backend architecture, from his time at Stripe.

Aggregators and newsletters:

• InfoQ – Covers backend architecture trends, conference talks, and case studies.
• Increment (by Stripe) – Themed deep dives from engineers across the industry.
• Changelog – Podcast plus blog covering software engineering broadly, backend included.
• Pointer.io / Software Lead Weekly – Curated weekly reads relevant to backend and engineering leadership.

Following a handful of company blogs relevant to your stack (e.g., if you use Kafka, follow Confluent's blog) tends to be more useful long-term than trying to keep up with all of them.