Blog Voices

Congratulations to my friend Mario Romano for reaching 100 posts in October. The grand total of my posts from Nov/2006 doesn't reach 50, so it's an impressive figure.

That got me thinking in what I value on blogs, like the update frequency, the voice, and made me evaluate what are the blogs that I read most and that are my biggest influences.

So, here are the bloggers that I can't miss and which posts I value the most:

• Joel on Software is one of the expert voices that has been around longer. His posts show through his experience, and his opinions on Human Resources (hiring developers, ), Software Development (Process, UI), Project Management and Economics (Buy vs Build) are truly outstanding;
• Coding Horror is another great blog, with great opinions on Programming, Software Development, Project Management, and some off-topics that appeal to many programmers, that keeps an independent voice (somestimes a bit controverse);
• DevCatharsis, from my friend Mario Romano is a very good all rounder which has the same main interests that I have right now: Architecture, Functional Programming and Software Development Process;

Some more focusing on a specific area:

• On SQL, there's Kimberly L. Tripp and her great posts on index tuning and general SQL tuning. Has many code samples and comparative tests on performance;
• Paul Graham- Unofficial RSS Feed has some great insights on Lisp and recently a focus on startups;
• On Functional Programming, with a twist and focus to imperative developers, I really like defmacro.org (great articles on FP for the rest of us) and Did it with .NET (with a focus on C# 3.0 and recently F#). See also The Mechanical Bride (C# 3.0, Linq and lots of => lambdas);
• On Performance, Rico Mariani s Performance Tidbits, are a must, although it's been somewhat quiet since he became Chief Architect of Visual Studio (a huge job indeed). It has great analysis on performance from a very high level right down to the bit;
• On Microsoft, don't miss Mini-Microsoft to get a feeling on Microsoft internals, Human Resources, shares and profits;
• Creating Passionate Users from Kathy Sierra, which is shutdown due to some creeps that harassed her, has many good points on user focus and learning (she's one of the Head First series editors);
• On a fun perspective (or maybe not, as it reflects our reality), I really like Worse Than Failure and Dilbert (Ok, it's not a blog);
• There are also some other authors like Martin Fowler, Bruce Eckel that I prefer in book format, and Ted Neward on article format and not so much on blog format;

Ok, the list is getting long but I try to keep up to date on these. So what blogs am I missing and why?

What's on your blog short list? If someone reads this, post your list and the reasons why it's on your list.