How I Find Interesting Websites

I emailed a link to a friend which prompted him to ask “how do you find so many interesting things on the internet?”

I start with curated newsletters. My favorite is Hacker Newsletter. Emily Ding’s Landmarkings is good. So is Austin Kleon’s 10 things worth sharing this week.

The flow looks like this:

If there is a Now page, I read it. If there is an About page, I read it. If there is a Start Here page, I read it. After that I visit the homepage. What I’m looking for is someone who looks to be publishing interesting things. If I find a couple articles that look promising, I’ll save them to read later. If those articles prove to be interesting, I’ll add the site to my RSS reader.

An example from a recent sleuthing: Gergely Orosz has written a blog since 2015; he’s authored three books; he started a newsletter in 2021. I wanted to find if Gergely had written anything about the publishing of his books. I started with this google search site:blog.pragmaticengineer.com writing books. That lead me to his article called Undervalued Software Engineering Skills: Writing Well. In that article he linked to a tweet where he listed a few authors talking about writing.

I didn’t find what I was looking for on Gergely’s site, but I did find three new blogs to read.