Some of the most useful technical content today comes from individual authors sharing their expertise, experiments, and lessons learned. Substack has become one of my favorite places to discover and follow these voices.
I’ve selected 40 newsletters worth reading across AI engineering, system design, engineering management, and product management. If 40 feels like too many, start with the top five in the category that interests you most.
🔖 Bookmark this post for future reference. This is a living collection that I’ll regularly update with new discoveries and remove newsletters that are no longer active.
🛠️ AI Engineering
For understanding models and building AI applications. View the full collection.
Ahead of AI (229K+ subscribers) by Sebastian Raschka. Sebastian works through the mechanics of language models, from attention and tokenization to training and fine-tuning. The diagrams and code make research papers easier to follow.
Simon Willison’s Newsletter (75K+ subscribers) by Simon Willison. Simon tests new models and tools in public, often with runnable examples. His notes on prompt injection and what agents actually do are especially useful when a demo leaves out the failure cases.
Import AI (148K+ subscribers) by Jack Clark. Jack reads frontier AI papers closely and connects their findings to security, policy, and the way AI research is funded. A useful weekly read for understanding why a result matters outside the lab.
AI by Hand (78K+ subscribers) by Prof. Tom Yeh. Tom turns model internals into exercises you can work out on paper. Following the arithmetic through a small example makes attention and other model operations less abstract.
Elevate (56K+ subscribers) by Addy Osmani. Addy writes about software engineering habits and how AI coding tools change them. His guides focus on the work around code generation, including specifying tasks, reviewing changes, and testing the result.
AI Newsletter by Elvis Saravia. AI research, tools, and techniques worth understanding.
Decoding AI Magazine by Paul Iusztin. Moving AI applications from prototypes to production.
Vanishing Gradients by Hugo Bowne-Anderson. Conversations about building and operating AI systems.
Shrivu’s Substack by Shrivu Shankar. Coding agents, LLM experiments, and practical engineering lessons.
SwirlAI Newsletter by Aurimas Griciūnas. Production AI, MLOps, and data engineering.
🏗️ System Design & Architecture
For designing software systems and weighing architecture trade-offs. View the full collection.
ByteByteGo Newsletter (1,000K+ subscribers) by Alex Xu. ByteByteGo uses annotated diagrams to show how requests, queues, and data move through large systems. Its case studies make it easy to see why a design changes as traffic grows.
Dear Architects by Luca Mezzalira. Luca curates five resources each week on software architecture, including how team structure and engineering culture shape the systems we build.
Level Up Coding System Design (35K+ subscribers) by Nikki Siapno. Nikki explains the building blocks of backend design, including databases, APIs, and queues. The System Design Handbook gives those topics a coherent path from fundamentals to larger designs.
Tech World With Milan (50K+ subscribers) by Dr Milan Milanović. Milan connects architecture choices with the engineering practices needed to live with them. His writing is useful when the hard part is deciding which trade-off a team can maintain.
Architecture Weekly (12K+ subscribers) by Oskar Dudycz. Oskar curates architecture resources through the lens of a practitioner who builds event-driven systems. Expect useful reading on event sourcing, CQRS, and domain modeling alongside broader architecture topics.
Architecture Notes by Mahdi Yusuf. Illustrated architecture and infrastructure deep dives.
System Design Codex by Saurabh Dashora. Distributed systems, API design, and architecture patterns.
Byte-Sized Design (on X). Digestible system design lessons and architecture case studies.
The System Design Newsletter (253K+ subscribers) by Neo Kim. Neo breaks down scaling choices with examples from real systems. The focus is on the reasoning behind choices like adding a cache, partitioning data, or changing how services communicate.
Software Design: Tidy First? by Kent Beck. Software design, refactoring, and managing complexity.
Bonus pick: Software Architecture Weekly by Vladimir Ivanov. Backend architecture and engineering patterns.
👥 Engineering Management
For leading engineers, improving how teams work, and growing organizations. View the full collection.
Engineering Leadership (203K+ subscribers) by Gregor Ojstersek. Gregor writes about the decisions engineering leads face as their scope grows, from delegation to working with other teams. The practical examples make the advice easy to discuss with your own manager.
Refactoring (176K+ subscribers) by Luca Rossi. Luca writes about leading software teams and making technical strategy usable in day-to-day work. Refactoring mixes original essays with case studies and curated reading for engineering managers.
Manager.dev (28K+ subscribers) by Anton Zaides. Anton focuses on the recurring work of an engineering manager: giving feedback, developing people, and keeping a team effective. The advice is grounded in situations managers actually face.
The Engineering Manager (36K+ subscribers) by James Stanier. James writes about the transition from engineer to manager and the work that follows: hiring, coaching, and dealing with organizational bottlenecks. His perspective spans both first-time managers and experienced leaders.
The Pragmatic Engineer (1,100K+ subscribers) by Gergely Orosz. Gergely reports on how engineering work happens inside technology companies. His reporting connects technical decisions with hiring, organizational structure, and the incentives behind them.
Engineering Enablement by Abi Noda. Developer experience, engineering productivity, and measurement.
Practical Engineering Management by Mirek Stanek. Hands-on approaches to managing engineering teams.
Stay SaaSy (on X). Candid lessons on management, teams, and scaling SaaS companies.
Engineering Leader’s Playbook by Karol Wójciszko. Practical frameworks for engineering leadership and team execution.
High-Impact Engineering by Roman Nikolaev. Building effective engineering organizations and delivering results.
🎯 Product Management
For product discovery, strategy, growth, and execution. View the full collection.
Lenny’s Newsletter (1,000K+ subscribers) by Lenny Rachitsky. Lenny brings together interviews and essays about how product teams grow and make decisions. The strongest pieces show what a team tried, how it measured results, and what changed next.
Product Growth (245K+ subscribers) by Aakash Gupta. Aakash covers product growth alongside the work of building a product career. His guides turn topics such as growth strategy and PM interviews into concrete steps and examples.
The Product Compass (141K+ subscribers) by Paweł Huryn. Paweł publishes frameworks and templates for discovery, strategy, and execution. The Product Compass is useful when you need something you can take into a planning or discovery session.
Elena’s Growth Scoop (99K+ subscribers) by Elena Verna. Elena writes about growth through the mechanics of activation, retention, and monetization. Her work helps explain where a product-led growth model breaks and what teams can test next.
The Beautiful Mess (60K+ subscribers) by John Cutler. John writes about the messy systems around product work: incentives, dependencies, and the way teams decide what to do next. His diagrams make those dynamics easier to recognize in your own organization.
Shreyas Free Newsletter by Shreyas Doshi. Product judgment, leadership, and career decisions.
Cracking the PM Newsletter by Jackie Bavaro. PM skills, interviews, and growing a product career.
Top 1% Builder with Ravi by Ravi Mehta. Product strategy, AI, and becoming a stronger builder.
Department of Product by Rich Holmes. Product trends, AI, and how technology companies build.
Untrapping Product Teams by David Pereira. Helping product teams focus on outcomes and customer value.
Browse all four newsletter collections.
Did I miss any great newsletters in these categories? Or do you know some hidden gems that deserve a place on this list? Let me know in the comments.
And if you enjoyed this collection, subscribe to my newsletter for more curated resources, practical insights, and technical deep dives into AI and software engineering.
Mine didn’t make the cut. Need to try harder 😉 thanks for the great list!