If you're into .NET and Microsoft tech, I really enjoy Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew [1], which is updated just about every morning with a curated list of blog articles on .NET topics.
That's probably the only programming blog I regularly check, though I return to Open Mirage every now and again to see how they're getting on:
http://www.openmirage.org/
I really love James' articles, too. They demonstrate very thorough understanding, communicated in a fairly light manner. He also writes in a style that gets you thinking instead of giving you a flat opinion.
'Virtuos Code' by Software Craftsman and 'Ruby Rogues Podcast panelist' Avdi Grim is well worth reading.
He's recently been learning new languages (currently SmallTalk) and does great writeups of new insights he's having and how others can apply these insights too.
A few of my favoriates from my RSS reader (in no particular order) include:
- http://www.kalzumeus.com/blog/ I love reading anything by Patrick McKenzie because he writes about incredibly valuable things, usually focusing on how to make sales, lifecycle emails, running his companies, and other general start-up related information. You might recognize him on HN as patio11
- https://blog.cloudflare.com/ CloudFlare has really excellent content and often writes about SSL/TLS related topics, which personally interest me. They have good technical explanations of SSL/TLS vulnerabilities and discuss how they provide SSL to all of their customers. Also, they discuss how they handle massive scale and other interesting things.
- https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/category/week-in-review/ I often find really good articles linked from the AWS blog. I like to stay current on the latest/greatest features and improvements which AWS puts out there and the Week in Review posts are often easy to skim and see if a linked article is worth reading in its entirety.
- https://codeascraft.com/ Etsy's engineering blog is fantastic. I am always blown away at the passion that comes through from their posts. They seem to have a really sharp set of devs over there and I just enjoy reading their stuff. I especially enjoy the quarterly performance review posts, which show graphs about latencies throughout their stack.
- https://strongloop.com/ The StrongLoop blog has some really great content for NodeJS devs. They often post about their own products, which is understandable but annoying since I do not use them directly. They took over maintenance of ExpressJS, though, which I use daily and they also have great contributions to a bunch of other tools in the ecosystem.
- https://www.hashicorp.com/blog HashiCorp made popular tools like Vagrant, Packer, Terraform, etc. I enjoy using most of their products and I like the way their blog presents things in a straight forward tone without too much marketing BS. Seems like a great company culture.
- https://www.imperialviolet.org/ Imperial Violet is the blog of Adam Langley (http://www.rsaconference.com/speakers/adam-langley), a security engineer at Google. He writes about SSL/TLS and many other security related topics. His technical explanation of POODLE and other SSL/TLS vulnerabilities are hugely useful and very digestable.
[1]: http://www.alvinashcraft.com/