Updated on September 16, 2017

Added Versioning, Frontend Focus, Web Animation Weekly and removed those that are not being released anymore.

Keeping up to date with the ever-changing world of web development is tricky. You can either get overwhelmed by the amount of JavaScript frameworks and new shiny projects that promise you 10x productivity or you can just say, to hell with it and pray not to be left behind in the web development world.

Don’t desperate; we have you covered! In this post, I will walk you through the benefits of newsletters as a source of web development related news, and I will also recommend some of my personal favorites.

My Experience

I’m a voracious reader, but weeding through tons of resources and blogs to find the most interesting and insightful content was time-consuming. There was always a moment where the content piled and the days didn’t have enough hours for me to even look through my queue. I couldn’t keep up, and I had a web-news meltdown.

Now I don’t spend that much time looking for content to read, and I have to say my life is much happier for it. Thanks to the newsletters that show up in my inbox weekly, I don’t miss anything and am confident I’m up to date with the latest and greatest without allocating all my time to searching.

Advantages

Newsletters are awesome because they are concise while keeping you relatively up to date with whatever is going on in the web development community. I say relatively because I probably won’t be able to take part in most day to day conversations going on on Twitter, but for me, that’s good enough.

Some newsletter curators will filter the best content on the web for you, and you can find  niche newsletters covering the more geeky libraries and projects you are interested in.

I have split a bunch of hand picked newsletters on three categories: Software development in general, Front-End and Back-End.

Software Development

Hacker Newsletter

Every Friday Kale Davis manually curates the best articles from the Hacker News site. This newsletter includes a number of categories: Code, Design, Books, Videos, Work, Learn and Fun between them.

Web Development Reading List

I love how Anselm Hannemann writes this web centric newsletter. He’s like a friend who catches you up on what happened last week.

Software Lead Weekly

I’m not a team leader, and still, this newsletter is pretty interesting for me. Articles about culture, people and communication curated by Oren Ellenbogen every Friday.

Versioning

If you don’t mind receiving a newsletter daily, Sitepoint’s Versioning newsletter will keep you up to date with all that happened in Frontend, Backend, Design and even the business side of the web. Curated by Adam Roberts.

Front-end and JavaScript

Smashing Magazine Newsletter

This publication has been one of my favorites since I started building sites 8 years ago. In their newsletter, they cover news about Web design, UX, CSS and front end development. Always with the quality seal of Smashing Magazine.

Responsive Design Weekly

Every Thursday, Justin Avery sends his selection of featured news, articles, tools and tutorials related to Responsive Web Design. A great place to know about the current best practices on the multi device web world.

JavaScript Weekly

This is one of the long runners, with more than 350 issues already released. It’s also one of my favorites, dealing with all kind of interesting stuff, including Node.js news. Curated by Peter Cooper.

Frontend Focus

Another publication by Peter Cooper, every Wednesday we receive the latest news about the Frontend world. Previously named HTML5 Weekly it is mainly about HTML, CSS, WebGL, Canvas and a bit of JavaScript.

Web Animation Weekly

Every Tuesday Rachel Nabors selects articles that helps us to achieve those ‘wow’ moments in our user interfaces.

Web Tools Weekly

Curated by Louis Lazaris, this newsletter is packed with links to all kind of front end related tooling. If you start new projects frequently or are freelancing, this is pretty darn useful.

Dashing D3.js

This highly specialized newsletter curated by Sebastián Gutiérrez brings the latest data visualization and d3.js news right to your inbox once per month. I may be biased due to my love of d3.js.

Back End technologies

Python Weekly

Every Thursday Rahul Chaudhary picks articles, talks, tutorials and tools related to Python and Django.

Ruby Weekly

Another one brought to you by Peter Cooper, this newsletter has already released 360 issues. This newsletter is full of useful information for Ruby and Ruby on Rails developers.

WPMail.me

News, plugins, themes, podcasts, and videos about one of the most famous CMS’s on the web. I have to admit I haven’t read many posts from this newsletter but felt this list wouldn’t be complete without one WordPress newsletter, especially now that the REST API has made this platform a bit more interesting.

Web Operations Weekly

Another new publication by Peter Cooper that covers the Devops field, with a special emphasis on web performance.

Wrapping up

Web development newsletters save me a huge amount of time each week. I’m all for other people reading and curating the web so I don’t have to. Thanks to them, I’m still up to date with what’s going on in the community, and I can get my fix of deep dives into my niche interests.

Am I missing a great newsletter from my list? Have other ideas about keeping up to date? Let me know @golodhros.

Photo credits: James Abbott