Can you recommend programming blogs for learning new tools and comparing infrastructure approaches?

Absolutely — here are some strong programming and infrastructure blogs that are good for:

• learning new tools
• seeing real-world engineering tradeoffs
• comparing infrastructure approaches
• staying current without too much fluff

General engineering / infrastructure blogs

1. Cloudflare Blog

Good for: networking, edge computing, security, distributed systems
Why read it: Often explains how large-scale infrastructure works and compares approaches in practice.

2. AWS / Google Cloud / Azure engineering blogs

Good for: cloud architecture, managed services, scaling patterns
Why read it: Useful for comparing vendor-specific solutions and understanding what each platform optimizes for.

3. Netflix TechBlog

Good for: distributed systems, reliability, observability, data pipelines
Why read it: High-quality engineering writeups with practical lessons from large-scale systems.

4. Uber Engineering Blog

Good for: infrastructure evolution, microservices, data platforms, deployment patterns
Why read it: Good examples of how teams migrate systems and make architectural decisions.

5. Stripe Engineering

Good for: developer experience, APIs, backend design, operational reliability
Why read it: Clear, well-written posts that often focus on tradeoffs and maintainability.

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Blogs focused on tools and practical development

6. HashiCorp Blog

Good for: Terraform, Vault, Nomad, Packer, infrastructure automation
Why read it: Great for learning infrastructure tooling and infrastructure-as-code patterns.

7. GitHub Blog / GitHub Engineering

Good for: developer workflows, CI/CD, code review, platform engineering
Why read it: Helpful for learning how engineering teams build internal tools and workflows.

8. Datadog Blog

Good for: observability, monitoring, tracing, incident response
Why read it: Useful if you want to compare observability approaches and tooling.

9. Grafana Labs Blog

Good for: metrics, dashboards, logs, observability architecture
Why read it: Good for understanding open-source monitoring stacks and comparisons with proprietary tools.

10. Kubernetes Blog

Good for: container orchestration, platform engineering, cluster management
Why read it: Great for tracking ecosystem changes and understanding Kubernetes-related infrastructure choices.

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More deeply technical / comparative blogs

11. Martin Fowler

Good for: software architecture, refactoring, distributed systems patterns
Why read it: Excellent for comparing architectural approaches and learning the language of tradeoffs.

12. InfoQ

Good for: architecture, cloud, DevOps, language/tool trends
Why read it: Mixes articles and talks; useful for broad comparisons across ecosystems.

13. The New Stack

Good for: cloud-native tooling, DevOps, platform engineering
Why read it: Good overview of the infrastructure landscape and competing tools.

14. High Scalability

Good for: architecture at scale, distributed systems case studies
Why read it: Strong for learning how real systems are built and scaled.

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If you want strong “compare approaches” content

These are especially good for architectural tradeoffs:

• Martin Fowler
• InfoQ
• High Scalability
• Uber Engineering
• Netflix TechBlog
• Cloudflare Blog

If you want to learn new tools quickly

These are especially good for tool adoption and practical usage:

• HashiCorp
• GitHub Engineering
• Datadog
• Grafana Labs
• Kubernetes Blog
• AWS / GCP / Azure blogs

A few good independent blogs

These often have highly practical, opinionated posts:

• Joan Westenberg for broader tech commentary
• Bernat Gabor for backend/infrastructure topics
• Aphyr / Kyle Kingsbury for distributed systems and database behavior
• Dan Luu for systems and performance-oriented essays

If you want, I can also give you:

1. a short curated list of the best 10,
2. blogs specifically for DevOps / cloud / backend / frontend, or
3. blogs that are less corporate and more opinionated.