Worth your time

McM Travels mcmtravels.com My wife

Michelle is a travel agent, and she plans the trips the photographs on this site come from. If you have ever wanted to go somewhere and then quietly given up around the third browser tab, that is the specific problem she solves. She is also the reason I have been to twenty-three countries and can find my way around approximately four of them.

Tom McAllister tom.mcallister.ws My brother

Novels and essays. He is the better writer in the family and we both know it, which is why I stick to footnotes about DNS. Start wherever the site tells you to start; he has thought about that more carefully than I have.

Julia Evans jvns.ca

The clearest writing anywhere about how computers actually behave rather than how they are supposed to. She is the reason I stopped apologising for explaining the basics, which is more or less the whole premise of my own blog.

Brandur Leach brandur.org

Long, careful pieces about databases, infrastructure and the craft of running software for years rather than quarters. Also the best-set personal site on the web, which is not unrelated to why you are looking at this one.

MacSparky macsparky.com

David Sparks writes about working deliberately with the tools you already have. Very little of it is about my kind of engineering and I read all of it anyway.

Wireshark wireshark.org

Learn it before you need it. The first time you open it in anger you will drown; the fourth time you will find the problem in ninety seconds and look like a wizard to everyone in the room.

RIPE Atlas atlas.ripe.net

Run a probe at home and you get to see the internet from the outside for free. It has settled more than one argument with an ISP for me, and it is a genuinely nice thing to contribute to.

The Art of Electronics artofelectronics.net

Horowitz and Hill. I have owned it for eleven years, understood maybe a third of it, and that third has been worth the whole price several times over. The bench half of everything I write starts here.