I recently finished university and started my first job in IT administration. My coworkers often share personal blogs written by sysadmins, especially posts about problems they solved, technical experiments, and interesting projects. I really enjoy both the practical write-ups and the occasional off-topic posts. What websites, blogs, or newsletters do you regularly read and find useful? I'm particularly interested in Linux, LDAP, networking, C, Assembly, COBOL, server monitoring, and thoughtful or critical writing about LLM research, but I'm open to recommendations on almost any technical topic.
6 Answers
If you work with Microsoft environments, AdminDroid’s blog is useful for Microsoft 365, Entra ID, PowerShell, security, and the constant stream of changes administrators have to track. For deeper networking material, Network Automation and Packet Pushers are good choices, while Greg’s Wiki has plenty of old-school troubleshooting knowledge. CNCF, InfoQ, and InfoWorld are also worth adding for cloud-native systems and broader engineering coverage.
Some more personal and varied technical blogs: apalrd.net has excellent systems and Wi-Fi explanations, netmeister.org has great networking and Unix material, Jeff Geerling covers Linux, hardware, and home infrastructure, and Antranig’s blog has some interesting FreeBSD posts. Computer.rip is more of a technology-history site, but its older telecommunications and computing articles are fascinating. Tailscale’s blog also has helpful networking pieces, especially on NAT, IPv4, and the historical evolution of LANs.
Once you have a long list of blogs, RSS is probably the easiest way to keep up with them. An RSS reader lets you follow everything in one place instead of checking dozens of bookmarks manually. Many technical blogs still publish feeds, and you can organize them into folders such as Linux, networking, security, and programming.
For security and current incidents, BleepingComputer and Krebs on Security are worth following. BleepingComputer’s updates can be especially useful for hearing about new vulnerabilities and active threats early. The Register’s BOFH is a fun, fictionalized break from the more serious material.
Don’t overlook COBOL if you’re interested in it. It may seem like an old technology, but there’s still a strong demand for people who can maintain and understand the systems built with it. Many organizations are actively looking for new developers and administrators who can work alongside their experienced COBOL teams.
A few consistently useful picks are TaoSecurity, The Networking Nerd, Troy Hunt, The Pragmatic Engineer, and the Cloudflare blog. For large-scale engineering write-ups, I also like the technical blogs from Netflix, Meta, LinkedIn, Uber, Dropbox, GitHub, Stripe, Slack, and Amazon’s distributed-systems blog. They cover everything from infrastructure and networking to reliability and software architecture.
I come back to the Microsoft 365 and identity articles pretty often. They’re useful for catching up on changes and filling in gaps that are easy to miss in day-to-day administration.