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

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall reception and value

  • Many commenters like the core idea: a centralized search across high‑quality engineering blogs, helpful when learning new technologies or seeking deep dives.
  • Some say they’d use it weekly if performance and UX improve.
  • A few question the premise that the “best insights” come from big-company blogs; they find that claim overstated.

Performance, UX, and Cloudflare issues

  • Multiple reports of very slow search and filtering, especially on mobile; these were later partially addressed.
  • Suggestions to debounce search input to avoid firing too many requests, and to improve filter responsiveness.
  • Complaints about Cloudflare challenges: captchas, CPU‑intensive checks that can lock up browsers or drain batteries, described as effectively “DoS-ing” the client.
  • Dislikes for infinite scroll and lack of a visible scrollbar.

Feature requests & roadmap ideas

  • Strong demand for RSS: both a master feed and possibly user‑defined feeds; also date filtering.
  • Requests for filters by topic (including excluding AI/LLM content), language tags (e.g., C#, ASP.NET), relevancy/“hottest” sorting, and ordering by latest.
  • Ideas for user accounts to curate personal lists, upvotes, and a weekly automated newsletter of top articles.
  • Suggestions for Fediverse/ActivityPub integration.

Content scope, sources, and curation

  • Many requests to add specific company blogs (Netflix, Fly.io, Ramp, ClickHouse, JetBrains, etc.) and to expand far beyond the initial ~16 companies.
  • References to large public lists of engineering blogs and OPML blogrolls as seeding sources.
  • Debate over breadth: some argue for a tightly curated 10–20 best blogs; the author leans toward hundreds plus user‑level curation.
  • Discussion of using RSS as a standard vs. its incompleteness for full historical indexing; question raised about using AI for custom parsing.

Alternative tools & related projects

  • Several related projects mentioned: personal-blog search engines, more social link aggregators, topic-focused “lenses” on other search engines, and general developer news aggregators.
  • Feedback on these tools includes parsing quality, summaries vs originals, randomness vs daily “front pages,” and trust concerns around browser extensions.

Meta discussion: engineering and RSS culture

  • Side thread on “engineering” being de facto narrowed to software/AI and frustration about title dilution vs licensed professions; counterpoint that licensed titles (e.g., P.Eng.) still carry meaning.
  • Nostalgia for the “RSS era” and arguments that RSS is still alive and useful for discovering and following blogs.