06 — Blogs and Newsletters

Every blog listed here posted something in the last 12 months (verified). Blogs that went silent — even famous ones — are excluded, because a dead blog stops being an active teacher. RSS these six into a reader (NetNewsWire on macOS, or newsboat in your terminal); do not follow them via Twitter.

The six active blogs

Blog	Author	Last post verified	Focus	Link	Why this
null program	Chris Wellons	Dec 23 2025 (unix find → bytecode); C-tag Jun 2025	Deep C hygiene, arenas, ergonomic C, W64 dev	https://nullprogram.com/ · C-only: https://nullprogram.com/tags/c/	If you read one C blog, this is it. Wellons writes the kind of C you want to grow up to write.
Julia Evans — jvns.ca	Julia Evans	June 2025 (“Secret Rules of the Terminal” zine); Feb 2025 PATH tutorial	Linux, terminals, debugging, git, C basics for scripters	https://jvns.ca/	Best explainer of “how the system actually works” on the internet. Her zines (paid) are worth every dollar.
Fabien Sanglard	Fabien Sanglard	Mar 27 2025 (Quake, MTG history); Game Engine Black Book updates 2024-25	Game engine internals, Quake/Doom source reads	https://fabiensanglard.net/	The template for “read a real codebase and write about it.” Read his Wolfenstein 3D and Doom articles in M11.
danluu.com	Dan Luu	Dec 22 2025 (Patreon); ongoing ai-coding/ notes 2025	Perf engineering, industry commentary, keyboards/CPUs	https://danluu.com/	Data over vibes. Read his “Why don’t schools teach debugging?” and “Latency mitigation strategies” pieces.
Brendan Gregg	Brendan Gregg	Nov 22 2025 (“Intel is listening”); May 2025 (“Doom GPU Flame Graphs”)	Performance engineering, perf, eBPF, flame graphs	https://www.brendangregg.com/	The perf reference. His book Systems Performance is the field manual; the blog is the running commentary.
Programming in the 21st Century	James Hague	Active, occasional	Program design essays with C-adjacent takes	https://prog21.dadgum.com/	Slow-blog cadence but every post is worth a re-read.

Newsletters worth an email address

Newsletter	Author	Cadence	Cost	Link
Computer, Enhance!	Casey Muratori	Weekly	Free tier + paid course	https://www.computerenhance.com/
The Pragmatic Engineer	Gergely Orosz	Weekly	Free + paid tier	https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/ — not C-specific but the systems studies (Lattner, Bellard-adjacent) are gold
DEV Community · #c tag	community	Constant	Free	https://dev.to/t/c — signal-to-noise mediocre; use for sampling, not subscribing

Blogs to check quarterly (not daily)

• Aleksey Shipilëv (shipilev.net) — JVM-focused but memory-model articles apply to C11 atomics.

• Bruce Dawson (randomascii.wordpress.com) — Windows/Chromium perf debugging masterclass.

• Raymond Chen (devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/) — 20+ years of Windows engineering war stories, C-heavy.

What most people get wrong about blogs

They subscribe to 40 feeds, skim 400 posts, remember zero. Six feeds; read every post; write one sentence in your notes about each. The corpus you build over 13 months of notes on other people’s blog posts is a personal reference more valuable than any book you’ll buy.

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