This article was originally posted on Eventbrite's Engineering Blog.

Keeping up to date in web development is a tricky thing. You can either get overwhelmed by the amount of JavaScript frameworks and new shiny projects that promise you 10x productivity or you can just say, "to hell with it" and pray for not be left behind on the web development world :(.

But I have you covered! In this post I will walk through the benefits of newsletters as a source of development related news, and I will also recommend some of my personal favorites.

My Experience

I am a voracious reader, and I like to read interesting and insightful content. I used to gather all that content myself, keeping track of lots of resources and blogs, sometimes with the help of netvibes or any RSS feed reader, sometimes just by visiting link aggregation sites on the field. However, there was always a moment when the content piled and the days didn’t have enough hours for me to even know what I had in my queue (not even talking about reading it!). I couldn’t keep up, I had a web-news meltdown!

Nowadays I don’t spend that much time looking for content to read, and I live a much happier life. I still don’t want to miss anything important but I have the feeling I am up to date without allocating all my time to reading, thanks to the good amount of newsletters that show up every week in my inbox.

Advantages

In general, I love newsletters because they are concise whilst at the same time they keep you relatively up to date with whatever is going on in the web development community. And I say relatively because I probably won’t be able to take part in most day to day conversations going on in twitter, but for me, that’s good enough.

Also, some newsletter curators will filter the best content on the web for you, and you will also be able to find niche newsletters dealing with the more geeky libraries and projects you are interested in.

Another great asset of newsletters is that they build community. There is a comforting feeling when you recognize the name any of the people that produce interesting content. It helps you identify the main characters and trends in your field, and who knows? It could be an extra motivation to see yourself as one of them one day!

I have split a bunch of hand picked newsletters on three categories: Software development in general, Front-End and Back-End.

Here they are:

Software Development

Hacker Newsletter

Every Friday Kale Davis manually curates the best articles from the Hacker News site. This newsletter includes a number of categories: Code, Design, Books, Videos, Work, Learn and Fun between them. I really like it because is not just coding stuff, there are more things interesting for geeks like me (us).

Web Development Reading List

I love how Anselm Hannemann writes this web centric newsletter: like a friend that catches up another on what happened last week. I just discovered his publication while researching for this post, and a look in its archive revealed it was worth your time.

Software Lead Weekly

I’m not a team leader, and still, this newsletter results pretty interesting for me. Articles about culture, people and communication curated by Oren Ellenbogen every Friday.

Front-end and JavaScript

Smashing Magazine Newsletter

This publication has been one of my favorites since I started building sites 6 years ago. On their newsletter, they cover news about Web design, UX, CSS and front end development. Always with the quality seal of Smashing Magazine.

Responsive Design Weekly

Thursday is the day Justin Avery chose to send his weekly selection of featured news, articles, tools and tutorials related to Responsive Web Design. A great place to know about the current best practices on the multi device web world.

JavaScript Weekly

This is one of the long runners, with more than 240 issues already released. It’s also one of my favorites, dealing with all kind of interesting stuff, including Node.js news. Curated by Peter Cooper.

NCZOnline

This is one of the newest ones, and it is so new that only one issue has been released. However I cannot give enough credit to one of my all time code-heroes, Nicholas Zakas.

Web Tools Weekly

Newsletter curated by Louis Lazaris, it is packed with links to all kind of front end related tooling. You will find it pretty useful if you are freelancing or need to start new projects frequently.

Dashing D3.js

This highly specialized newsletter curated by Sebastián Gutiérrez brings you every Tuesday the last data visualization and d3.js news. I really enjoy this one, but I am a bit biased as I love d3.js.

Back End technologies

Python Weekly

Every Thursday Rahul Chaudhary picks articles, talks, tutorials and tools related with Python and Django. I don’t read it a lot, but in Eventbrite I am sure is pretty popular.

Ruby Weekly

Another publication of Peter Cooper, this newsletter has released already its 250th issue. Full of useful stuff for Ruby and RoR developers.

WPMail.me

News, plugins, themes, podcasts and videos about one of the most famous CMS’s on the web. I haven’t read many posts from this newsletter, but I felt this post will be empty without WordPress representation, specially now that the REST API has made this platform a bit more interesting.

Web Operations Weekly

Another new publication by Peter Cooper that covers the devops field, with an special emphasis on web performance.

Wrapping up

Web development newsletters save me a lot of time every week, other people read and curate the web so I don’t have to, they keep me on top what happens in the tech community. They are especially interesting when they actually deal with your niche.

My personal workflow currently includes skimming the newsletter emails looking for interesting headings. Then I save the articles with a read-later app like Pocket, Instapaper or Readability, sharing them later on my social profiles, if they are worth the time.

How does your reading workflow work? am I missing a great newsletter from this list? Don’t hesitate to tweet me @golodhros to keep the conversation going!

Photo credits: James Abbott