I am so annoyed at scare tactics as a dark pattern trying to get you to upgrade your SaaS subscription. This is Google Docs doing so. I am already a paying customer - and no, I don't have "sensitive files" shared externally. Such a cheap way to try to get more $$, Google

A free, non-VC funded lifestyle business idea: AI training / workshops for devs Massive demand from more traditional companies that have budget for this and are seeing devs not really picking up these tools. They want to invest Doesn’t exist as far as they are aware

Chris Lattner is one of the most influential engineers of the past two decades. He created LLVM, Swift, contributed to TensorFlow, and created the Mojo language. What was the story about creating Swift - and why did he face resistance inside Apple when wanting to replace Objective C? (cont'd)

Blind (and much of mainstream media!): the AWS outage is the result of “mass layoffs, outsourced talent.” Me: talks to the AWS engineers handling the incident. Turns out the creators of the systems impacted were in the call (not laid off!), no outsourcing etc Will share more

Coming tomorrow on @pragmaticengineer.com - with Chris Lattner!

The promise of AI chat assistants: they solve 90% of the problems users have (by looking up the docs and telling them) My reality: need to spend 10 minutes trying to get to a human, to solve an issue I need customer support to look into Around minute 8 I sign up to a competitor

Rare to read a post arguing about the importance of software architecture BUT doing it without software architects than this one. And you can just sense the hard-earned scars Matt got on the way: at Netflix, Twitter & other places: Such a good read: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/what-is-go...

An under-discussed topic: how the hottest software engineering job of the early 2010s is seeing a steady but ongoing decline the last few years. I'm talking about the native iOS and Android positions. Outside of Big Tech, few startups/scaleups hire for this. Since ~2022?

Another instance of mainstream media reporting on a trend I covered in @pragmaticengineer.com months before. This time with The Financial Times, 4 months later: My deepdive in Aug: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/forward-de... The FT yesrterday: www.ft.com/content/9100...

A dev told me how one of my blog posts helped his book pitch be accepted by a publisher: helping validate broad interest in the topic. The book now getting published! My blog post was inspired by another post I read online... love how ideas inspire one another in our field

OpenAI has started to hire junior software engineers, and it's working great for them. This comes from me talking with Sulman Choudhry (Head of ChatGPT Engineering). They've started calling them "super juniors" because of the impact they are having newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/san-franci...

Noticed how a formerly super hip / “break all the rules” GenZ startup with the mission to “make generational wealth” pivoted to being the most boring enterprise SaaS: their website as bland as it gets, “download for Windows”, “Talk to Sales” etc They realised B2B > B2C for $$

NVIDIA > Amazon + Meta NVIDIA > Microsoft + Netflix + Palantir NVIDIA = Google + Meta This type of cap table math was not on my bingo card

Why does "vibe coding" usually not lead to anything productive? A great person to answer is @addyosmani.bsky.social: working on Chrome for 10+ years, and is the author of the book Beyond Vibe Coding. Watch or listen: • YouTube: youtu.be/dHIppEqwi0g • Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/12dW...

AWS becoming the "millennial" cloud? A thing I'm sensing here and there: Early-stage startups don't bother onboarding to a cloud service like AWS. They instead go for more "hip" startups for web hosting and databases. Think Vercel, Render, Railway, Supabase They *might* move much later

I didn't believe it until I saw it: but it *really* works in open offices! This is ML engineer Menoua Keshishian at Wispr Flow HQ, in SF, coding... by whispering into his mic (a BOYA Gooseneck that costs ~$70). I was standing next to him and heard nothing. Everyone in the office does the same

The only two Big Tech companies that neither did mass layoffs when business was booming, nor when things looked bleak: Apple** and NVIDIA All others (Amazon, Google, Meta) did (and do) mass cuts as business is booming. Corporate reality **Apple not since 1997 that is

I keep being amused by some devs claiming that multi-region support for a service should be easy to add. Then turns out they're unaware of what active-active arch is. Multi-region support is not all that complex from afar, but it gets complicated with the details.

One realization from the AWS outage: Those saying Vercel is "just" an AWS wrapper that charges more than AWS were... wrong. Vercel failed over and recovered ~10 hours before the AWS outage was over. Them (and other IaaS / PaaS platforms) invest into multi-region resillience...

I hate how airlines treat their software department as a cost center - and as a result, their websites are unusuable for edge cases; but there is no monitoring on these; passengers suffer, devs don't know or care. This is Delta, when trying to submit a reimbursement request 👎

It's great that AWS already shared a postmortem, and we can understand some things that went wrong, starting the outage. A summary of the events, based on what the AWS team shared:

Can we for a second appreciate how Robinhood took no responsibility for being down, and tried to put the blame on AWS. However, it was Robinhood that decided to run from a single AWS region, and not be preapred to fail over, like other, more resillient AWS users did...

The Wall Street Journal is coveing today the same trend I shared in @pragmaticengineer.com, back in August: extreme hours at AI startups.covering Pretty validating when mainstream media covers the same trends months later! (And a reason to be subscribed to The Pragmatic Engineer!)

No way the UK's tax authority (HMRC) was running their operations off of a US data center ... but they were! AWS us-east-1 outage knocked them offline, and exposed relying on US infra to serve the British public Ironic from a government with ample home grown DCs + talent

The #1 criteria for my browser is that I trust it, and it’s secure. It’s logged into my email, Stripe account, stores my passwords and credit cards. A browser is useful if it does all these. These AI browsers are interesting but… with prompt injections, no way I trust them…

I have yet to see an successful example when a non-devtools company launches a devtools product Spotify is trying just this: offering a more advanced, hosted version of Backstage A for effort, but given this is not Spotify's focus (at all!) if this could/would work this time?

A weird outcome of yesterday's AWS outage: Atlassian's Status Page was down (customers could not record outages.) So today, dashboards for companies that were down are green... because they could not record the downtime!! Substack one example (the site was down, hard)

Some of the most unexpected fallouts of an AWS outage: 1. Postman stopped working: an API development tool built to be an alternative to simple tools like curl. 2. Eight Sleep customers couldn’t use their beds to change positions / set or keep temperature

I cannot recall this ever happening: Amazon's flagship property (and cash cow) Amazon .com having issues throughout the day, due to AWS infra problems. It's easy to criticize Google for not building Google Search on GCP - but as a result, Search has no GCP dependencies!

Half the internet seems to be down thanks to the us-aws-east-1 outage Perplexity, Amazon .com, Signal all down (just 3 services I tried to use) When aws-us-east-1 sneezes, the whole world feels it indeed

My week in SF, in stickers, from the offices that do have them It was great to stop at Cursor, OpenAI, Anthropic, Modular AI, Factory AI and see what’s cooking from the inside It’s very energizing, exciting and SF is back (probably never left)

Interesting impact of Claude Code: I dabble with frontend, but not a frontend expert. I always reached for etiher some templates or something like Webflow to put together some landing page. Now I started to... ask Claude Code to build me as per my spec. A big reason for it:

Always a good day to hang out with @kentbeck.com

What is it really like to be an engineer at Google? With @hejelin.com , we spent months researching the engineering culture of the search giant, and talked with 20+ current and former Googlers to bring you this deepdive. Watch or listen: • YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj9Q... (cont'd)

From a dev at Big Tech: “3 devs across 3 teams are stuck for a month on a build problem that’s caused by connections resetting between two gateways and a messaging queue. I cannot solve it because I’m blocked access to the other 2 teams’ systems. I cannot see AI solving this.”

The Scaling Era: an Oral history by Dwarkesh Patel , Gavin Leech and Stripe Press is such a creative idea for a book. You can catch up on year’ of progress in a format that works better for me than just listening to each podcast episode. I’m impressed. (Cutoff is Nov 2024)

The Software Engineer’s Guidebook is now available as hardcover from Amazon. Here’s me holding the first print (the proof - it’s nice!) And it’s also out as an ebook on the O’Reilly platform. Get it here: engguidebook.com

Not far-fetched to assume that the engineering team responsible for the lockouts have yet to be notified/realize that there’s an outage they prob caused At traditional companies the disconnect between customers+ the product is huge. Often broken feedback channels, monitoring etc

The last days talked w engineers and EMs/ tech leads inside Cursor, OpenAI, Anthropic in their HQ. The daily tooling they use to build sw is so different to most of the industry (outside AI startups) But what a great engineer in these places feels like it remains… unchanged vs rest of industry

When is Python, Rust or Go a great choice as a language - especially if deciding which one to build a startup with? Here's Armin Ronacher (the creator of Flask) comparing the three languages. Full video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=45kV... (YouTube) open.spotify.com/episode/0dg3... (Spotify)

I heard someone describe Azure as “the Boomer cloud” Crude but also accurate Cannot recall any startup that is not on AWS or GCP

What would you like to know about Netflix’s engineering culture? I’ll be asking the best person to answer soon: Netflix CTO Elizabeth Stone

PR stands for "public relations." It's a team inside a company that attempts to control the public image of a company. Amusingly, at several tech companies, PR teams have become "the no publicity" teams. They end up blocking devs sharing what would be super interesting stuff

I still think about when New Relic wrote a blog arguing that customers should leave vendors acquired by private equity (PE) b/c prices will go up+quality will go down. It was a stab at Sumo Logic just bought by PE. 6 months later New Relic got bought by PE...and deleted the blog

It bothers me to no extent that the media plays how Klarna whistles Klarna wants to the headlines to say "AI-enabled Klarna" It would have halved its workforce without AI because it overhired 2x in 2020-21 and never corrected till now But this is how they get front pages

What is ServiceNow and what companies use it in relation to software engineering? And to do what? (It showed up in The Pragmatic Engineer 2025 survey with similar numbers rif mentions as Backstage, and even after reading ServiceNow’s About page, I remain utterly confused.)

Thoughts after my first Waymo ride: 1. It drives smoother than ~80% of drivers I rode with 2. The “you know exactly what to expect” aspect (no driver who might or might chat me up, or be on the phone, or be a bad driver) is underrated 3. Waymo is the best ad for Jaguar

Every single oncall tool or paging tool now call themselves an “AI platform” or “AI-first operations platform” 🤡 (Pretty sure it’s not just the oncall tooling category btw)

An experienced dev is writing a book about real-world architecture learnings at a bunch of companies, incl Comcast. But they are not mentioning Comcast b/c when they worked there, the over-eager legal department heavily “censored” their public talks. What a loss for Comcast…

I deleted my last post that showed a FT chart claiming that ChatGPT adoption in 2.5 years was like the internet in 13. The data was low quality and unclear. I do see AI tools spread quickly in software engineering at the day-to-day. It’s worth being aware if you’re not already, that was my point.