Data Engineering Blogs to Follow
in 2026
It’s been a while since I’ve dredged the corners of the inter-webs to find the interesting and worthwhile content. Now that ChatGPT is responsible for most of the glop plopped onto LinkedIn articles, finding real, authentic content is more valuable than ever.
It’s been about 5 years or more since I’ve written “Top Blogs to Follow” post, so let’s do a refresh.
Let me preface this by saying this is MY favorite top Data Engineering blogs that I FOLLOW. We might have different tastes and be interested in other things; we are distinct, you and I. It’s also important to me that the content is posted regularly, once every few months is rarely going to make my list.
I am going to try to put them into a few different categories to help summarize what we are dealing with and how I think about consuming content.
Thought Leadership
Corporate Engineering Blogs
Simple Data Engineering Content
Analytics
General Programming
Top Data Engineering Blogs and Newsletters to Follow
So without further ado, and in no particular order, I’m just going to list the categories, the blogs in each category, and WHY I read them.
Thought Leadership
Joe Reis is the author of the most popular data engineering book and has many thoughts on the data world and community.
You’re pretty much an idiot if you work in data and don’t follow SeattleDataGuy
https://www.jesse-anderson.com/category/blog/
A true OG of the data space
Robin is a cool and thoughtful dude 😎
substack.thehustlingengineer.com
Hemant Pandey on how to be a good engineer
How to rise in the ranks
Jordan Cutler has one of the best Substacks in the land.
the best content of all time by Steve Huynh
Learn leadership by Gregor Ojstersek
Hard-hitting content by Yordan Ivanov
Corporate Engineering Blogs
Simple Data Engineering Content
Vu Trinh deep dives into a plethora of Data Engineering content.
Ananth Packkildurai has the GOAT Substack that gives a general overview of what’s happening in the data space and what others are writing about.
Substack written by one of the premier data personalities of our decade mehdio.
Incredible depth in complex data engineering topics luminousmen
https://www.waitingforcode.com/
Very technical with depth.
that OG of Data Engineering Zach Wilson , too the moon.
good stuff by robertsahlin
Bro comes up with everything Julien Hurault
Just plain old good data engineering content by Junaid Effendi
pipeline2insights.substack.com
General Data Engineering by Erfan Hesami
Analytics
learnanalyticsengineering.substack.com
The GOAT for real-life analytics content Madison Mae
Just stuff
Databricks stuff
practicaldatamodeling.substack.com
Another good one by Joe Reis
General Programming
newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
What’s happening in the great world of programming in general.
John Crickett is actually the smartest person on the internet
https://towardsdatascience.com/
just general stuff
good programming stuff by Kevin Naughton Jr.
learn everything from Alex Xu
general programming thoughts
I know this probably barely scratches the surface, but that’s about all I can reasonably keep up on in my spare time. I try to focus on finding non-AI-generated content that has a hard edge or lots of real-life content, not pie-in-the-sky stuff that has no real meaning in daily data engineering life.
Feel free to add suggestions in the comments if there is relevant stuff.
Thank you for the shout-out!
I feel flattered to be in the same list with such great authors. Thank you!