Our Top 10 Big Data News Sources

At a recent internal course on how to get started blogging we discussed the importance of blogs as a way of keeping up to date with technology. That’s even more important in the faster moving parts of technology like big data. We spoke to people in our data tribe about how they keep up to date, resulting in this collection of our top ten (plus one) data-related newsletters.

• Data Elixir is a relatively new newsletter containing curated data science news and resources from around the web. It’s a great mix of news, tutorials, and tools. Several days after a publication there’s still conversations going on aroud the office about articles from this newsletter.

• Hadoop Weekly is one of the first big data related newsletters that was subscribed to in our team. Our big data journey began with Hadoop, so it’s only natural that our reading is heavily influenced by this. This weekly newsletter provides a good summary of the week’s top news in the Apache Hadoop ecosystem.

• Changelog Weekly is not strictly speaking data-related, generally covering more web development type topics. However there are some great pieces on open source development in general, and it’s good to keep up to date on the wider open source technology community.

• Devops Weekly has some good articles around building technology teams with a devops slant as well as technology-specific articles which align closely to keeping a large number of servers running.

• Ruby Weekly may seem like an unusual choice for a big data developer, but many of our internal tooling is written in either Ruby or JRuby. It’s also Alice’s go-to choice of language for quickly hacking something together.

• O’Reilly Data Newsletter is another relatively new newsletter (at least to us). From guides to new technology to building a data science team, it’s quite a wide range of topics. But there’s always something relevant in each edition.

• NoSQL Weekly isn’t specifically about big data and not all of the solutions work at scale, instead it covers NoSQL data in general. Most of the posts tend to be centred around a use-case, and tend to be quite involved - which is good for getting your hands on something you’ve not worked with before.

• Data is Plural is a little unique in this list, covering a weekly selection of open datasets. From the useful to the unusual, there’s plenty here to play with if you’re wanting to try out some new ideas. Quite often but not always US-focused.

• Data Science Weekly as the name suggests is very specifically for data scientists. As a big data engineer it’s something to skim read, as a data scientist there’s lots of interesting topics.

• Artificial Intelligence Weekly is a weekly collection of news and resources on AI and Machine Learning. It’s mostly good for seeing what other companies are doing in this cutting edge area of technology, but there’s also some useful software and hardware mentions.

• High Scalability comes out on a Friday afternoon, and reading this on the train home from work has become something of a tradition. From interesting projects to play around with over the weekend to inspiring thoughts around operating at scale, there’s always hidden gems in this rather large weekly blog. Whilst the other selections in this list sometimes have duplicate articles, this one is usually a very different collection of content.

If podcasts are more your thing then start with this list

Finally there are some great people on Twitter posting shorter thoughts on all areas of big data. As a starter for ten, Silicon Republic recently shared 18 top data science accounts you need to follow on Twitter.