Reading tech newsletters is an important way for IT leaders and professionals to stay up to date. As new trends and technologies emerge, these newsletters are key to staying ahead of the curve on the latest advances.
Newsletters offer an efficient way to stay informed, with links to good resources, summaries of the latest news, and quick overviews of in-depth articles. Subscribing to newsletters curated or written by leaders in the industry means you’re getting quality information in an efficient way. What’s better? Many of the best newsletters are free.
Yet, time is precious. With so much information available—a 21st century problem—it can be hard to know where to subscribe and what to read. So, we put together this roundup of the 15 best technology newsletters, from our humble perspective. These newsletters cover a range of audiences, from developers, programmers, and IT pros to tech leaders, enthusiasts, and amateur hobbyists.
(This article is part of our Tech Books & Talks Guide. Use the right-hand menu to navigate.)
Happy reading!
Benedict’s Newsletter
Audience: IT and business leaders
Frequency: Weekly
Cost: Free and premium options
Benedict’s Newsletter is the most-cited tech newsletter, making it a must-read for IT leaders. Benedict’s Newsletter is curated by Ben Evans of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. (We like one of their podcasts, too.) This weekly newsletter offers free and premium options:
- Free subscribers get an email every Tuesday that includes links to relevant news and blog articles.
- Premium subscribers ($10/month or $100/year) receive an email every Sunday with links to the same articles that come in the free newsletter plus an exclusive weekly column and a more in-depth analysis of the week’s news.
Around 150,000 people currently subscribe to Benedict’s Newsletter. Evans has been creating this resource since 2013, describes it as covering, “my notes for the week on the news that actually matters and what it might mean, plus any new blog posts here.”
Benedict’s Newsletter focuses on tech and upcoming changes in the industries, covering a broad range of topics including mobile, productivity, innovations, cars, machine learning, augmented reality, and virtual reality.
Bizarro Devs
Audience: Developers and anyone else
Frequency: Monthly
Cost: Free
Bizarro Devs is a free newsletter that is curated by a team of people at ThemeIsle. It’s an informative and entertaining read, serving up links to obscure yet interesting and relevant articles. The key benefit of this newsletter is that it unlocks articles, tools, and websites you might not otherwise see.
Despite the name, Bizarro Devs is not a newsletter only for developers. It covers a wide range of topics all relating to technology. You’ll look forward to reading this and to learning something that more mainstream publications likely missed. Side benefit? Since it’s a monthly release, it won’t clog your inbox.
Box of Amazing
Audience: Tech enthusiasts
Frequency: Weekly on Sundays
Cost: Free
Curated by Rahim Hirji, it offers “a weekly digest covering emerging technology trends and extraordinary articles, handpicked to broaden your mind and challenge your thinking.” Box of Amazing is a Sunday newsletter that covers a broad range of technology trends like:
- AI
- Robotics
- Cryptocurrency
- Drones
- e-commerce
- Anything else on the technology horizon
Besides offering quality content, Box of Amazing is great because it’s easy to consume. Articles are shared in separate boxes, with each including a short summary of the article. It makes good on its promise to be a 3-minute read of 3-hours of information.
DevOps’ish
Audience: DevOps folks
Frequency: Weekly on Sundays
Cost: Free
DevOps’ish is assembled weekly by Chris Short, a DevOps expert and Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Ambassador. This newsletter is link-sharing with a technical perspective. Many articles Short shares focus on Kubernetes, open source cloud, DevOps culture, and even a roundup of IT-related mishaps.
DevOps Weekly
Audience: DevOps and programmer pros
Frequency: Weekly
Cost: Free
Enthusiastic developer, designer, and product owner at Sync, Gareth Rushgrove curates DevOps Weekly which focuses, as you can tell, on the wide world of DevOps. With former stints at Docker and the UK Government Digital Service, Rushgrove gives you an expert perspective on DevOps news. He also sums up what he’s learning from on-the-ground development and his hobby of experimenting with up-and-coming programming languages.
The Download
Audience: Early adopters and those on the bleeding edge of tech
Frequency: Daily
Cost: Free
The Download is a free daily newsletter with the tagline, “What’s Up in Emerging Technology?” It’s curated by MIT’s Technology Review with the goal of providing readers with up-to-date information on emerging tech. It includes links from academia and news outlets and, while it covers a broad range of tech topics, it gives readers the option to subscribe to subtopics like AI, blockchain, and space tech.
If you’re looking to stay at the forefront of tech advances and to always be informed on the most cutting edge advances, this is a daily must-read for you.
Exponential View
Audience: Futurists
Frequency: Weekly
Cost: Free and premium options
Curated by Azeem Azhar from Harvard Business Review’s editorial board, Exponential View aims to help readers “get smarter about the future.” As you can imagine, it’s focused on innovation, discussing regular topics such as AI, robotics, tech in politics, devices, and machine learning.
Exponential View is a weekly newsletter that offers a free and a premium version:
- The free version shares links to articles, primarily on exponential technology.
- The premium version also gives regular access to posts about theories and analysis of what will come next.
An added plus of this newsletter is that it often includes some light stuff too, including a section offering “short morsels to appear smart at dinner parties.”
Fully Charged
Audience: Tech pros and enthusiasts
Frequency: Weekly
Cost: Free
Fully Charged by Bloomberg Technology shares links and news in a story-like manner. Rather than a list of articles, Fully Charged shares a summary of news, articles, and resources in one short and easy to read email.
If you prefer the list of links, it closes with a few quick summaries of “other things you need to know in global technology news.”
Import AI
Audience: Real artificial intelligence enthusiasts
Frequency: Weekly on Mondays
Cost: Free
AI is a perennial tech topic. Import AI is focused on keeping readers updated on all of the latest AI topics, with the biggest and most recent news, chatter, and research on AI.
Import AI is curated by Jack Clark, who you might remember from ZDNet, The Register, or Bloomberg. He’s currently at House of Elon’s Open AI, where he sends this dense newsletter out every Monday, chock full of key links, summaries, and insights on the latest in AI.
On Tech with Shira Ovide
Audience: Tech enthusiasts of any ilk
Frequency: Daily
Cost: Free
Shira Ovide has long covered technology, from The Wall Street Journal and now with The New York Times with the On Tech newsletter. Each edition reads like a handwritten letter from a friend who just happens to know a lot about technology and business: it’s timely, relevant, and assumes you already know the basics.
Ovide takes a human approach to technology, looking at where technology is helping us, how it might hurt us, and whether we may need government to regulate certain tech corners. Her approach is balanced and witty, with statements like this:
“2020 was the year when technology both proved more essential in our lives than ever and largely irrelevant in the most important parts of it.”
Other Valleys
Audience: Readers interested in technology beyond Europe and North America
Frequency: Infrequent
Cost: Free
Other Valleys is a good way to learn about the tech world beyond Silicon Valley. Curated by Anjali Ramachandran, the newsletter shares links to articles, with a detailed synopsis of each. In a conversational tone, Other Valleys looks at creative projects and entrepreneurial endeavors from around the globe.
Ramachandran describes her newsletter as offering, “media and technology news and ideas that are by and large NOT from the US/UK/EU.” She goes on to say, “I like knowing what is going on in other valleys around the world – now you can too.” Ramachandran often includes a focus on women in tech, too.
SRE Weekly
Audience: Site reliability engineers
Frequency: Weekly
Cost: Free
Every week, Lex Neva rounds up a few top articles on Site Reliability Engineering-related topics of scalability, availability, incident response, automation. As he puts it, “all things related to running large, massively multiuser online services.”
The roundup also includes any big outages that occurred—often with companies as well known as Twitter, Disney, and Slack. We particularly like this one for Neva’s clear, expert opinions, which he felt was lacking in the SRE world.
Software Defined Talk
Audience: Devs, programmers & cloud enthusiasts
Frequency: Twice weekly
Cost: Free
Yes, Software Defined Talk is a well-known podcast. But its fantastic hosts Brandon Whichard, Michael Coté, and Matt Ray also put together a fantastic newsletter that we’d be remiss not to mention. If you prefer reading the news instead of listening to it—or, if you’re like us and can’t get enough of the dynamic hosts—the Software Defined Talk newsletter is the place to go.
With a general focus on serverless, cloud, K8s, and DevOps, they break down the newsletter into useful, always relevant categories:
- The Rundown (Important news from the hosts’ perspective)
- Relevant to Your Interests (Related news at a glance)
- Sponsors
- Nonsense (Funny or random internet moments)
- Listener Feedback (might even include a job opening or two)
- Conferences
- News and hype for the SDT brand
- Recommendations
TLDR
Audience: Particularly those with short attention spans
Frequency: Daily
Cost: Free
TLDR is a free, daily newsletter that helps you quickly stay up to date on the news. Its tagline is “Byte sized news for busy techies,” and that’s just what it provides—after all, TLDR is internet shorthand for ‘too long; didn’t read’. These emails include a list of relevant news articles, tools, and links to cutting-edge tech updates. Plus, with short synopses of articles, you’re able to quickly get the key details of important news without sacrificing much substance.
TLDR is focused on tech, science, and coding, never sharing more than 10 articles per edition. What’s better, articles are displayed by topic, so you can read what you like and skip everything else. Topics are divided into:
- Big Tech and Startups
- Science and Cutting-Edge Technology
- Programming
- Design and Data Science
- Miscellaneous
Tedium
Audience: Anyone seeking in-depth, personal tech info
Frequency: Twice weekly
Cost: Free
Tedium offers a different type of read. Instead of sharing a roundup of stories, Tedium looks in-depth at one story per issue. Written by Ernie Smith, who you might know from his previous work at ShortFormBlog, Tedium claims to explore “the dull side of the internet.”
This newsletter is more personal than many others and is written in a conversational tone, as Smith talks about things like his most recent tech experiences, what he’s investing in, and what he’s recently acquired. If you’re interested in something that’s heavy on hardware and takes a deeper, yet entertaining, look at tech topics, subscribe to Tedium.
Top tech newsletters
This list should give you a good start on your weekly reading with some of the best tech newsletters available. Covering a broad range of topics, they’ll help you stay current on the latest news and trends in the industry. Plus, many will give you a quick and entertaining way to break up the workday. So, subscribe now and happy reading!
Additional resources
For related reading, explore these resources:
