Stephen O’Grady’s listed five five developer blogs he thinks people should read. More specifically, he listed five blogs he thinks are great that Bloglines reports have less than 100 readers each. Since I’ve been planning to follow up my post reviewing 5 baseball blogs I read with similar posts for different subject areas anyway, I’ll follow his lead and introduce you to 5 lesser-known (defined as less than 100 Bloglines subscribers to the feed I read) developer blogs I think are worth reading.

Note that Stephen himself is eligible for inclusion by his own criteria (85 subscribers as I write this). His blog is great; to top it off, he’s a Sox fan and frequently writes about our hometown nine. But I think including him in the list would be cheating, so consider him the zeroth entry. :)

Without further ado, here’s my list!

1. Web programmer and rollerblader by day, SBCL hacker by night, Dan Barlow has hacked up more than his share of exceedingly cool Common Lisp stuff, like Araneida and CLiki. From CLiki’s Araneida article, Araneida is a fairly small free extensible Web server for SBCL and many other Common Lisp implementations. CLiki is a wiki devoted to free Common Lisp resources, and is itself an application running on Araneida.
2. Brian Dear’s brianstorms often has very insightful observations on the industry from an entrepreneurial engineer in La Jolla. He’s one of the founders of EVDB, one of the startups I’m keeping a close eye on. I think they’re poised to do really great things. You can keep up with EVDB over at the EVDB Blog. Brian writes about usability and user experiences at his other blog, Nettle, which is also worth reading.
3. Martin Pool, probably best known for his work on distcc and rsync, is currently working for Mark Shuttleworth’s Canonical (makers of Ubuntu Linux, the most pleasant variant of Debian that I’ve ever used) on Bazaar-NG, their distributed, next-generation source control system. I think bzr has the potential to be the Open Source distributed source control system we’ve all been waiting for, and have been skimming the Bazaar-NG mailing list via the Gmane group gmane.comp.version-control.bazaar-ng.general.
4. Speaking of Canonical, former Mozilla developer and interface usability expert Matthew Thomas is working for them as an interface designer. His old blog still has plenty of great commentary on usability.
5. Olivier Travers’s blog covers a lot of territory at the intersections of Web design, up-and-coming technology, and the ins-and-outs of the tech business world. I’ve had several eureka moments while reading Olivier’s blog.

Of course, Stephen’s disclaimer applies to this post as well as his own:

Keep in mind that like my own space, these guys may well have alternative feeds that have well over 100 subscribers — and a hell of a lot more than I have. The only metric I’m going by is bloglines number for the feed I subscribe to. For any of the folks mentioned, if that’s the case, I hope you don’t take offense.