The Pulse #69: Building a social network is hard

T2 wanted to take on Twitter, but has shut down one year later – not before sharing learnings. Also: Replit organizes a tender offer for employees, and the outstanding launch of my book. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 5 months ago

I Wrote a Book on Growing as a Software Engineer

The Software Engineer’s Guidebook has taken more than four years to write – and it’s finally ready! I hope you find it a useful resource which serves your career well | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 6 months ago

The Pulse #68: AI Regulation is Happening – Fast

Also: how AWS prioritized enterprise customers with postmortems, learnings from Vercel’s customer incident, and the struggle to hire product-minded Android engineers in the US. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 6 months ago

Three Cloud Providers, Three Outages: Three Different Responses

This year, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud have all suffered comparable regional outages. How did they respond, and why do Azure’s processes stand out compared to its rivals? | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 6 months ago

The Pulse #67: Okta Schooled on Its Security Practices

Also: the largest DDoS attack to date mitigated; AWS quickly reversed the banning of re:Invent community apps; and advice for engineers considering joining a bootstrapped company. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 6 months ago

The Man Behind the Big Tech Comics

Manu Cornet created some of the most referenced Big Tech comics, with a special focus on Google and Twitter. Today, he shares how he started doing comics and his creative process. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 6 months ago

The Pulse #66: When a software engineer is asked to do someting illegal

Engineers at FTX, Frank and Pollen were asked to do something potentially criminal. Find out how they responded. Also: update on the author of an impressive side project, who got an offer at PostHog | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 6 months ago

Stacked Diffs (and why you should know about them)

Meta and Google have been using stacking for closer to a decade: a coding workflow that is very efficient for small PRs. So what is stacking, and how come it’s not more widespread in the industry? | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 6 months ago

The Pulse #65: Longer hiring processes for engineering managers?

Also: an update on Linear after their $35M fundraise; why does Chrome direct valid domains to Google Searh; and the dangers of discussion employer-confidential stuff on semi-public Slack groups. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 6 months ago

Building an Observability Startup: Chronosphere

From learning to code in Australia, to launching Chronosphere in Silicon Valley. Cofounder and CEO Martin Mao shares his story, and offers advice for aspiring founders currently at tech companies. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 6 months ago

The Pulse #64: Pressure on Commercial Open Source to Make More Money

HashiCorp changes its license, while Insomnia looks for ways for users to create personal accounts. Is commercial open source software (COSS) becoming more or less sustainable with these changes? | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 7 months ago

Lessons from Bootstrapped Companies Founded by Software Engineers

We hear little about bootstrapped companies, despite bootstrapping being an effective way to get up and running. We cover five successful bootstrapped firms you’ve probably not heard of – until now | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 7 months ago

The Pulse #63: Working at a startup vs in Big Tech

Also: are we about to see a spike in startup shutdowns; and is downlevelling becoming more common across Big Tech? | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 7 months ago

Cloud Development Environment Vendors

Remote development is an increasingly hot trend across the industry, with more vendors launching every year. A thorough overview of 28 cloud development startups and open source solutions. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 7 months ago

The Pulse #62: The End of the Tech IPO Winter

Tech IPOs are back: Arm, Instacart and Klaviyo have gone public. Also: lessons from Bun disrupting the Node ecosystem; Twillio’s iconic billboard change and more pulse on the industry. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 7 months ago

How Big Tech does Quality Assurance (QA)

Most Big Tech companies have no dedicated SDET, QA, or tester roles. How do they produce quality software? A look into how Microsoft, Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Uber and Netflix do it. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 7 months ago

The Pulse #61: What’s going on at Google Cloud?

Google Cloud caused an outage at a scaleup, after lowering a quota; and months later the same outage repeated. Also: what were perf reviews like at Meta, and do two GCP zones share the same building? | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 7 months ago

How Uber Built its Observability Platform

Uber built an in-house observability platform called M3 to cope with huge quantities of data, as the business grew with breackneck speed. Martin Mao, former manager on the team, shares the story. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 7 months ago

Building Meta’s Threads App (Real-World Engineering Challenges)

The Threads app was downloaded by more than 100M people on launch week. So did the engineering team build the app, and handle an unexpectedly intense launch? Exclusive. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 8 months ago

Why are Cloud Development Environments Spiking in Popularity, Now?

Tech companies are building their cloud development environments (CDEs) and dozens of vendors are launching their offerings. But why now? An overview of how this landscape evolved the past decade. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 8 months ago

Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey, Part 2

The consultancy giant has devised a methodology they claim can measure software developer productivity. But that measurement comes at a high price – and we offer a more sensible approach. Part 2. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 8 months ago

The Pulse #60: Tech IPOs are back!

Also: Instacart cutting on Snowflake spend while onboarding to Databricks; Why companies go public; Scaleups that could IPO in 2023; and ChatGPT’s enterprise plan. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 8 months ago

Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey

The consulting firm came up with a methodology they claim can measure software developer productivity. But that measurement comes at a high price – and we offer a more sensible approach. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 8 months ago

The Pulse #59: NVIDIA's Massive Growth and the Generative AI Boom

Also: Twilio’s iconic billboard replaced in San Francisco; McKinsey now selling developer productivity measurement; and why it’s so hard to build the “developer cloud.” | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 8 months ago

Building a Simple Game

A technical deep dive into concepts involved in developing a fun game | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 8 months ago

The Pulse #58: Zoom; An RTO Turning Point?

Also: Stack Overflow’s traffic decline; SAP migration causes outage at Booking.com, Amazon enforces RTO and a senior engineer's job hunt story. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 8 months ago

The Machine Learning Toolset

Commonly used machine learning (ML) tools, a day in the life of an ML engineer, and typical paths into the ML field. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 9 months ago

The Pulse #57: Google Shutting down Firebase Dynamic Links

Also: details behind the salary bands at Wise; Hopin selling its events tech business; Startup shutdowns trending up; and Uber posting its first operating profits. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 9 months ago

The 2023 Tech Market, as Seen by Hiring Managers

Hiring managers and experienced engineers at more than 50 companies share how they observe the hiring market changing. Insights from the US, EU, UK and other regions. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 9 months ago

A Day in the Life of a Senior Manager at Amazon

A representative log of what one day might look like for a Senior Manager at Amazon. Guest post from former Amazon director Dave Anderson | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 9 months ago

What is a Senior Software Engineer at a Scaleup?

How the role is typically defined at medium and large-sized venture-funded companies. Details from Honeycomb, Wise, Miro, Travelperk, Sentry, Sourcegraph, Remote.com and Urban Sports Club | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 9 months ago

How to Sell an Early Stage Startup: Lessons from Akita Software

Jean Yang sold her startup to Postman. At a time when venture funding is harder to get, and acquisitions are trickier to close, she shares what worked for her and offers honest advice. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 9 months ago

Interesting Learnings from Outages (Real-World Engineering Challenges #10)

A DNS mystery at Adevinta; A failover causing an outage at GitHub; The challenge whether to do a rollback at Reddit; and the difference between public and internal postmortems. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 9 months ago

Has the startup bankruptcy wave started? (The Pulse #56)

Bird and VanMoof are likely to go out of business. Also: a stricter promotions process at Amazon, and advice on selling developer tools when most companies cut spending. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 9 months ago

Software Architect Archetypes

The Painfully Precise, The Philosopher, The Approachable One, The Detailed Documenter and 8 more archetypes. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 9 months ago

The Scoop #55: Things are picking up at Meta

Also: Instagram Threads going head-to-head with Twitter, the old concept of ‘slotting’ at Google and OpsGenie was down again. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 10 months ago

What is a Senior Software Engineer in Big Tech?

How the role is typically defined by Big Tech and at larger tech companies, and frameworks for thinking about seniority. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 10 months ago

The Scoop #54: Domain Registrars which Developers Recommend

Google Domains was a favored registrar among devs. What other registrars do they recommend? Also: Atlassian flattening its engineering org, and Amazon pushes back MBA new grad hires. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 10 months ago

Cloud Development Environments

Software engineers at large tech companies are developing less locally, and more with remote dev environments. But what is the idea behind CDEs and how are companies building their own? A deep dive. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 10 months ago

The Scoop #53: Google Domains to shut down

The search giant is shutting down Google Domains, Google Cloud Domains, and selling its customer accounts to Salesforce. What’s the impact on Google Cloud? Also: Google’s Duet AI pricing and capabilit | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 10 months ago

The State of the Tech Market in 2023

Reflecting on the tech market from compensation, VC funding and RTO dimensions. What are the fundamental shifts happening that we’ve not seen in more than a decade? | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 10 months ago

The Scoop #52: AWS’s us-east-1 outage

Also: why Meta is reducing its number of managers, HashiCorp’s ‘optimized’ job cuts process and an explosion of developers using AI coding tools. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 10 months ago

Inside Agoda’s Private Cloud: Part 2

The application stack running on the private cloud, Agoda’s cloud strategy, and whether to move to the cloud or stay on-prem. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 10 months ago

The Scoop #51: Pinterest’s new levels and reduced compensation bands

Also: pay rises at Shopify, potential buyers of Lyft, and advice on how to split compensation between cash and stock | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 11 months ago

Inside Shopify's Leveling Split: Exclusive

A deep dive into the e-commerce giant’s major change to its engineering levels, including a look at the levels before and after the revamp, how and why these new levels could benefit the company, and | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 11 months ago

The Scoop #50: Why are many Snap employees selling stock ASAP?

Also: analyzing job cuts at Lyft, the death of Robinhood’s remote work experiment, and an edicational Uber simulation side project that engineers can use as inspiration for their own ones. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 11 months ago

Inside Agoda’s Private Cloud Setup: Part 1

The evolution of data centers; the hardware inside data centers, and availability zones inside Agoda, and a tour of the DCs. Exclusive details. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 11 months ago

The Scoop #49: Should Glassdoor reviews matter for tech companies?

Also: a 1.5-month code freeze at Stack Overflow, early warning signs of cuts at AWS, and details on when Amazon will join the generative AI race. | Continue reading


@newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com | 11 months ago