Why I Built Tech Upkeep: Fixing My Newsletter Problem

I used to be subscribed to 23 different tech newsletters.

Every morning, I'd wake up to an inbox full of "must-read" articles, "breaking news" in tech, and "exclusive insights" that weren't actually that exclusive. Some days I'd get 15+ newsletter emails before I even had my coffee.

I wasn't reading most of them, I'd skim the subject lines, maybe open 2 or 3, and just ignore the rest.

The Newsletter Problem

Most tech newsletters fall into one of these buckets:

•Too broad: They cover everything from AI to blockchain to web3 to no-code. I don't care about half of it.
•Too narrow: Great if you're deep into one niche, but I need to know what's happening across the whole ecosystem.
•Too much noise: Some contained tech gossips and interesting news that are not useful to me.

TLDR

I tried TLDR. It's probably the closest thing to what I wanted. But you needed to subscribe to multiple categories separately.

Want tech news? Subscribe to TLDR Tech. Want AI updates? TLDR AI. Want crypto news? TLDR Crypto. Want web dev? TLDR Web Dev.

Now every morning i receive a series of newsletters and i ultimately ended up ignoring a few of them due to the spam.

"There has to be a better way to stay updated without drowning in newsletters.""

What I Actually Wanted

Here's what I realized I needed:

✓One email, multiple topics. Give me AI, DevOps, Web Dev, infrastructure updates - all in one place.
✓Curated, not comprehensive. I don't need every article published. I need the 10-15 things worth my time. Something that can keep me updated on the latest trends, the big tech trends and the tools that are actually useful.
✓Twice a week, not weekly. Tuesday and Friday. Small, digestible doses.
✓No fluff. No "Tesla may lose Elon Muusk if shareholders dont approve..."" or "OpenAI says yes to erotica for adult users." Just good technical content.
✓Sources I actually trust. Netflix engineering blog? Yes. Random Medium post? Probably not.

I wanted it to help me learn. Not just stay updated for the sake of it, but actually understand what's happening in tech and why it matters.

So I Just Built It

Here's the thing - I was already doing this for myself anyway.

Every few days, I'd spend an hour going through my sources. Checking GitHub Trending. Skimming Hacker News. Reading a few engineering blogs. Browsing Reddit. I'd bookmark the good stuff, save them in google drive and read them later and ignore the rest.

Then one day I thought: "If I'm already curating this stuff for myself, why not just send it out to other people who might find it useful?"

The Realization

I wasn't trying to build a startup. I wasn't trying to "disrupt newsletters" or whatever. I just wanted to solve my own problem - and maybe help a few other developers who had the same inbox nightmare I did.

So I built Tech Upkeep. Not as some grand vision, but as a tool to make my own life easier, and if it helps others? That's honestly just a bonus.

How It Actually Works

I aggregate content from 110+ sources (I add more sources as time goes on). Blogs, YouTube channels, podcasts, Reddit, GitHub Trending, Substacks - basically everywhere good tech content lives.

Then I filter it. Hard. Out of a few hundred items per week, I send maybe 20-ish per newsletter. If i don't like it, it doesn't make the cut.

The result? Two emails a week - Tuesday and Friday - with 20-25 articles each. Categorized by topic (AI, Web Dev, DevOps, etc.) so you can quickly scan for what matters to you.

What Gets Included:

•Engineering blogs from companies actually building at scale (Netflix, Uber, Stripe, etc.)
•GitHub Trending projects (because discovering new tools early is fun)
•Deep dives and technical breakdowns (not surface-level "intro to X" posts)
•Postmortems and war stories (we learn more from failures than successes)
•Emerging tools and frameworks (but only if they're actually interesting)

What Gets Filtered Out:

•Obvious marketing disguised as content
•"Here's my take on [trending topic]" hot takes with no substance
•Beginner tutorials (there are better places for those)

Why Curation Matters

Anyone can build an RSS aggregator. That's not hard. I think the hard part is curation - deciding what's worth someone's time and what isn't. I am using myself as a benchmark so maybe it doesnt appeal to others so maybe this isn't for everyone.

I treat every newsletter like I'm sending it to myself. Because honestly, I am. I read everything I send. If it's not good enough for me to read, it's not good enough to send.

That's the difference between Tech Upkeep and just another "tech news roundup." This isn't automated.It's me, a developer, sharing what I think other developers should know about.

The Future

I'm keeping it simple. No plans to scale this into some massive media company or whatever. No ads. No sponsored content. Just curating content as a byproduct of my own learning.

Will I eventually charge for it? Maybe, but quite unlikely. Right now it's free because I'm doing it for myself anyway. But if it keeps growing, I might just get sponsors or something.

For now, I'm just focused on making it the newsletter that I want. A simple, curated newsletter that I would want to read.

If this sounds like something you'd find useful: That's literally why I built it. Give it a shot. Worst case, you unsubscribe and we both move on with our lives. Best case, you finally fix your newsletter inbox problem like I fixed mine.

And if you don't like it? That's cool too. Maybe you're one of those people who actually reads all 23 newsletters every morning. More power to you.

But if you're like me - tired of inbox overload, tired of missing good content, tired of subscribing to 6 different newsletters just to stay updated then yeah, maybe give it a shot.

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Why I Built Tech Upkeep