Show HN: Engineering.fyi – Search across tech engineering blogs in one place

engineering.fyi

470 points by indiehackerman 5 months ago

I built a search engine for engineering blogs because I was tired of manually checking individual company blogs to find real-world production examples.

The problem: When learning a new technology, the best insights often come from how companies like Google, Meta, or Stripe actually implement it in production. But these gems are scattered across dozens of separate engineering blogs with no way to search across them.

What I built: Engineering.fyi indexes engineering blogs from ~15 companies (Google, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, Uber, etc.) and makes them searchable in one place. You can filter by topic, difficulty level, and whether articles include code samples.

Technical details: - Built with Next.js, SQLite, DrizzleORM - Custom scrapers for each blog (they're all frustratingly different) - Basic tagging system using content matching (still improving this)

Current status: Core search is working. Adding new blogs weekly as I index them.

Next features (based on early feedback): - AI summaries for quick article previews - Weekly digest of trending engineering insights - Save/bookmark articles (considering whether to add accounts)

Interesting challenges: - Each blog requires custom parsing logic (no standard format) - Building an accurate tagging system is harder than expected – started with exact matching but exploring better approaches

I'd love feedback on: - Which company engineering blogs you'd find most valuable to include - Whether AI summaries would actually be useful or just noise - How you currently discover engineering articles from these companies

freetonik 5 months ago

Shameless plug, but hopefully relevant enough: my directory and search engine for personal blogs[1] indexes over 1000 RSS feeds, and naturally lots of them are about engineering and software development. Full-text search is implemented with Typesense, and there are also "related" recommendations for each post, example [2].

1. https://minifeed.net/

2. https://minifeed.net/items/n1HZYMDEKyra

  • pnt12 5 months ago

    I was surprised that I started reading one blog on your site, and it was badly written. Only afterwards below the text, did I notice it was a summary!

    I'd advise to put it at the top, before the text, to let people know beforehand and not be caught off guard. Then you can have a big button saying "read full article in website" or something, to make it easy for people to see both options.

    • pnt12 5 months ago

      OK turns out it was not a summary, just a preview paragraph that mixed headers and text from the original, leading to strange casing and reading. I'd suggest not to include headers there or distinguish them!

      Example (had to search on kagi with site:minifeed.net):

      You Can Either Steal Great Developers or Farm Them To grow software development teams, you can either steal excellent developers or you can develop them internally.

      • freetonik 5 months ago

        Yeah, the parsing is suboptimal right now. I'll work on that!

    • pnt12 5 months ago

      Also when going back the page, I don't see that post anymore - it was featured in random blogs, so I lost it.

      It's a cool idea, but maybe a improvement could be to select a random handful per day, and let them stay there for a while? Fewer surprises this way!

      • freetonik 5 months ago

        Good idea, thanks! I was planning to modify the welcome page into that kind of "Minifeed Today" page, and to regenerate it only once a day.

  • jpmonette 5 months ago

    Looks really nice! Any plan to add social aspect like comments, likes and such?

    • freetonik 5 months ago

      Thought about it, but not sure yet. Not too many user yet for that sort of thing.

    • OisinMoran 5 months ago

      I'm building something similar with a bit more of a social angle (has comments, likes, and reposts) at lynkmi.com. If you sign up to the waitlist it's a very very short wait!

  • rkj93 5 months ago

    [dead]

gombosg 5 months ago

I kind of miss the RSS days when you just had your own news/blog aggregator without the annoyance of Substack, Medium or anything else.

  • rambambram 5 months ago

    Don't act like RSS is done with. It's twenty plus years old, and still going strong. Nobody is stopping you from using it, whether you only read or also post.

    Hyped up tech is like milk, it stinks after a couple of days. Open protocols are like fine wine, they age beautifully.

    P.S. Your site is offline. If it wasn't and you even had one interesting article, I would have added your website to my list of feeds. I picked up hundreds of interesting websites/feeds through HN alone in the last years.

    • ctxc 5 months ago

      Damn, if I knew I'd get one person to read what I write I'd have added RSS :P

  • dewey 5 months ago

    Less people are blogging these days but there's still a lot of interesting blogs out there. It's even more self-selected than before but I almost always find a RSS feed for a blog that I think is useful and interesting.

pbronez 5 months ago

Cool idea. I thought I’d try to make a Kagi Lens to accomplish the same thing:

https://kagi.com/lenses/LdYine8hZtYmrt8yTMngOUtvTM9rmkRy

Kagi Lenses can be defined in many ways, one of which is specifying URLs to search. Unfortunately you can only provide 10 URLs per lens. Here are the ones I chose:

https://stripe.com/blog/engineering, https://engineering.fb.com/, https://www.uber.com/en-US/blog/engineering/, https://netflixtechblog.com/, https://research.google/blog/, https://technology.riotgames.com/, https://incident.io/blog, https://www.anthropic.com/engineering, https://openai.com/news/, https://shopify.engineering/

  • pbronez 5 months ago

    When I use this lens to search for “Python” the top three hits are:

    Meta’s Pyrefly announcement (may 2025)

    Netflix post about their overall use of python (March 2013)

    Google’s announcement of the Croissant ML metadata format (March 2024)

  • __turbobrew__ 5 months ago

    No AWS blog? If anything I have found the AWS blog the highest quality and most novel. The articles on things like route53 are really interesting.

  • jzig 5 months ago

    Now make a lens of lenses!

kenanfyi 5 months ago

Looks good, but it‘s fascinating the term engineering nowadays almost only boils down to software(also mostly web) and AI, although it is way more than that.

  • mrugge 5 months ago

    the engineering that pays (big bucks)

    • kawfey 5 months ago

      idk, hardware engineering (whether electrical, mechanical, civil, aerospace, etc) is just as lucrative and IMO more interesting, since physics isn't an invention of the human mind like software is, and mistakes go boom instead of segfault.

      • kenanfyi 5 months ago

        As an hardware engineer, I can't say if it's more interesting or not, but definitely a different mindset and tempo you have during development. Things are not running in a sandboxed environment where you can iterate theoretically endless times.

mustaphah 5 months ago

It would be awesome to have a newsletter highlighting the top X articles (fully automated). You could start with a simple scoring system (page views) and maybe later add an upvote button so the most-voted articles get sent out each week.

Sending emails isn't cost-free, but AFAIK, Buttondown [1] has a free plan for up to 100 subscribers. It's dead simple: they provide an issue archive [2] and handle subscription for you [3].

With their 100-subscriber free plan, you could limit this feature to a close circle. Maybe later monetize the newsletter feature to cover the ESP costs.

[1] https://buttondown.com

[2] https://buttondown.com/hacker-newsletter/archive

[3] https://buttondown.com/hacker-newsletter

demarq 5 months ago

> When learning a new technology, the best insights often come from how companies like Google, Meta, or Stripe actually implement it in production.

I think not.

ozgrakkurt 5 months ago

Amazing idea but Cloudflare DDOSes my browser when I try to open it.

Also a nice reminder to move my website off of cloudflare asap

  • jagged-chisel 5 months ago

    Maybe I’m a bit out of the loop on Cloudflare’s activity these days, but I’m not sure I understand your statement.

    Cloudflare thinks your browser is part of a DDoS?

    Cloudflare is attacking your browser from several places across the internet?

    • ozgrakkurt 5 months ago

      On my phone, it locks up my browser with it’s “check” so I have to restart it.

      I understand it isn’t related to DDOS but used it as a joke since it is basically attacking my browser

skhameneh 5 months ago

Can you add cross support for Fediverse? I really haven't been keeping up but I think with ActivityPub you can support Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. A lot of the general support and progress went from GNU Social > Mastodon > whatever.

idosh 5 months ago

Shameless plug, you can find all of them and many more on https://daily.dev/. It's a personalized aggregator for developer news

  • grub5000 5 months ago

    I can't figure this one out - is it only a browser extension? The site keeps trying to trick me into installing a browser extension, which seems incredibly sketchy

mmargenot 5 months ago

Are you trying to stick with company blogs primarily, or to expand into general non-affiliated eng blogs? People like Maggie Appleton (https://maggieappleton.com/) and Patrick McKenzie (https://www.kalzumeus.com/) frequently have compelling ideas around technology, but I suppose that's a different "product" from what a company blog is selling.

  • indiehackerman 5 months ago

    Great suggestions, I'm a big fan of Patrick McKenzie as well. I was going to start with company blogs but expand to individuals as well if there's enough demand/usage

    • mmargenot 5 months ago

      Yeah, it's one of those things where it's very reasonable to draw a line between company and individual blogs and keep it to one or the other.

      In any case, I know there are some other solid individual blog collections in the comments - good luck with feature addition.

chandu_vrs 5 months ago

Nice work. I started working on something similar, but my use case is slightly different (but the solution is similar). We all are interested in certain topics, there is a lot of content that gets published and our time is limited, so we need something that helps us identify top 10 articles or so per topic. This is why most of us like HackerNews. I think HackerNews by topic or interest would be a good idea to implement (but along with users posting links, it can come from crawling few sites as well)

8organicbits 5 months ago

> Each blog requires custom parsing logic (no standard format)

This is unfortunate, RSS has promise to be that standard format. I've seen high adoption, but it's not universal.

  • indiehackerman 5 months ago

    I started off with scraping through RSS but quickly realised it doesn't include all historical posts

    • lysecret 5 months ago

      Are you using ai for the parsing/setting up the parsing structure?

Catbert59 5 months ago

First thing I saw was an annoying Cloudflare captcha.. ugh

fuzball1989 5 months ago

Are you sure you want to add hundreds of blogs? I would keep it curated to 10-20 otherwise it will turn into an RSS feed but I think you are chasing a goal of having the most interesting blogs to read and for people to use in their designs, coding etc.

  • indiehackerman 5 months ago

    I think people would get less value if I kept it to 10-20. I was thinking of extending it to have user accounts were people could create their own lists of the articles (based on company, author, tags, etc) on there if there was enough interest

WASDx 5 months ago

FYI here is a list of hundreds of engineering blogs: https://github.com/kilimchoi/engineering-blogs

bkhl 5 months ago

> Current status: Core search is working. Adding new blogs weekly as I index them.

I guess this is a reason why it does not have recent blogs from some of the sites. Otherwise, it's definitely something I'd use

brikym 5 months ago

I can't say I like the infinite scrolling and lack of body scroll bar.

ndom91 5 months ago

Nice one! You should definitely offer some sort of master rss feed though

  • indiehackerman 5 months ago

    Thanks for your support! Will add that to the list

SushiMon 5 months ago

Feature request -- allow users to add RSS feeds of blogs they want to follow, allow filtering by date

aeve890 5 months ago

>Engineering

Looks inside

>15 tech companies blogs

LtdJorge 5 months ago

Should definitely be able to filter out any of the sources. Unless that's already there and I'm not seeing it.

__natty__ 5 months ago

I have so many of tech blogs in my bookmarks. And I open them maybe once per month. How often do you read these blogs?

  • indiehackerman 5 months ago

    I read them especially when I'm picking up a new task at my job with new technologies

cosmicgadget 5 months ago

Great idea and the post preview cards are excellent.

I've found software security companies tend to have interesting blog posts.

  • indiehackerman 5 months ago

    Thanks for your support and the great suggestion!

FailureCrown 5 months ago

I can't find tags for C#, asp.Net

dbgrman 5 months ago

none of the filters seem to work for me. Good concept. Wish it wasn't in the done-to-death vibe coding UI.

  • indiehackerman 5 months ago

    Thanks for the feedback! Have made fixes to the filters so please try again

  • coldtrait 5 months ago

    What is a more standard UI that doesn't scream vibe coded?

bilguudeiblgd 5 months ago

It'd be nice if there' some kind of relevancy, or hottest* articles filters.

kushan2020 5 months ago

The performance is really slow on my phone - iPhone XR. Even selecting filters takes away lot of time.

  • indiehackerman 5 months ago

    Made some performance improvements, hope it's better for you now!

yieldcrv 5 months ago

Thanks for having a default feed to show an example of what to expect

So many show and tells neglect that

  • indiehackerman 5 months ago

    Thanks for your support and glad you liked it :)

kathir05 5 months ago

This is interesting stuff!! Love to see further updates and scale on this

  • indiehackerman 5 months ago

    Thanks for your support! Stay tuned for more updates

g8oz 5 months ago

I would add: - Instacart - Temporal - Pinterest - Etsy - Atlassian

majom 5 months ago

Great start. I would be great to see more blogs added to your project.

  • indiehackerman 5 months ago

    Thanks for your support! Will definitely be adding plenty more this week

Quitschquat 5 months ago

It would be cool to filter out the AI/LLM stuff

  • indiehackerman 5 months ago

    Will add that to the list, thanks for the suggestion

matkurianski 5 months ago

I always wanted something like that. Awesome job!

  • indiehackerman 5 months ago

    Thanks for your support! Glad I could help build it for you :)

dwedge 5 months ago

I love this idea. Like others mentioned the cloudflare is annoying and search is way too slow, but as a concept I like it. Make it faster and I can see myself using this every week

  • indiehackerman 5 months ago

    Thanks for the feedback! Search should be better now

    • netloks9599 5 months ago

      I think you might want to add a "debounce" to the search, typing more than a few characters at a time automatically kicks off a new request for the entire page

kwakubiney 5 months ago

Nice project. Filtering took forever though.

  • indiehackerman 5 months ago

    Have made improvements to the filters! Hope you get a better experience now

penguin202 5 months ago

I'll be building a MCP for this

xyst 5 months ago

AI-grifters: "why bother using yet another search engine? In a few weeks {{preferred LLM}} will be trained on the underlying data"

gricardo99 5 months ago

nice concept. fyi, search feature doesn’t seem to work

  • indiehackerman 5 months ago

    Thanks for your support! Search should be fixed now

tamimio 5 months ago

I believe there should be an industry standard to distinguish between engineers (the ones who spent 4-5 years in school) and software engineers (not necessarily those who spent 4-5 years in school) by name only. Either one should not be called engineers anymore, or the other should be called legacy engineers or something along these lines. I was expecting to search through articles of IEEE, RF, hardware maybe, or even other disciplines like civil and mechanical. The word "engineer" lost its meaning in the past ~2 decades because everyone now who touches a PC suddenly can call themselves an engineer, diluting the market now with hordes of bootcampers and "prompt engineers". How come we don't see the same in other white-collar jobs like doctors, nurses, lawyers, or even blue-collar ones that now require some sort of control over who calls themselves or is able to work in a trade by having apprenticeships? P. Eng isn't enforced, so it's meaningless.

  • xyzzy_plugh 5 months ago

    I have no idea how you can dismiss P.Eng as being meaningless. Engineer, yes, certainly overloaded. But P.Eng? It literally implies licensure.

    That's the industry standard.

    My GP and my veterinarian and also my librarian are all doctors, but less ambiguously they are respectively MD, DVM and PhD.

    • tamimio 5 months ago

      I am not the one who's dismissing it, industry does. You can get hired as an engineer, holding an engineering title with zero engineering education nowadays, you can have senior or principal title as well, and no formal education either. Find me one hospital that would hire a nurse that never had formal education or went through acquiring the proper license? No wonder a doctor can earn 4 times more than an engineer nowadays.