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 (though defunct as of 2023). 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 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.