Happy Holidays! In the final issue of the year, we look back on the year, with most-read articles, favorites, interesting podcast episodes, and trends across the tech industry for 2025. Read it here: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pragma...

Interesting AI coding feature rolled out at Meta called "trajectories." On diffs, devs can see the prompts used to generate it (if it was AI-generated.) Rolled out to everyone. Given more code is generated prompting: interesting experiment! Full: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-...

Today's deepdive is a rare behind-the-scenes on how AWS handles an outage. Details from October's outage from Senior Principal Engineer, Gavin McCullagh, who was part of the crew resolving this outage. Plus details on how incidents are handled at AWS: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-aws-de...

A new book by Nicole Forsgren and Abi Noda is out: Frictionless. We asked Nicole how this book relates to DORA and SPACE - frameworks on DevEx that she created. Her response: More on writing the book, and two full chapters from Frictionless: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/frictionle...

It's that time of the year... code freezes / deployment freezes will start at lots of companies. A deepdive on approaches at Big Tech; the upsides; downsides; and companies that don't do this at all: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/code-freezes

The book 'Frictionless' by Nicole Forsgren and Abi Noda is out - read two full chapters and the story behind (re)writing this book in today"s issue: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/frictionle...

We talked with 40+ devs building MCP servers to figure out the on-the-ground realities of building and using MCP - the good and the bad) Some surprising findings: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/mcp-deepdive

Impact-driven promotions almost always (eventually) lead to promotion-driven development. Little wonder it's so widespread throughout Big Tech and larger companies. Full: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/preparing-...

The only newsletter I actually pay for. Highly recommend.

The Pragmatic Engineer Black Friday deal is live! Get a year-long subscription for $120 (instead of $150). A sub gives you access to all deepdives, The Pulse, and resources for software engineers and eng managers. Available till Monday. Get it here: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/0ea36188

45+ gift ideas and inspiration for the tech workers in your life (and maybe yourself) this holiday season: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/copy-holid...

What caused the AWS outage that felt like it took down half the internet on Monday? It started with a race condition in DynamoDB's DNS propagation, which ended up setting the dynamod.us-east-1.amazonaws.com DNS to empty. A deepdive and more details: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/aws-outage-u...

How does the Claude Code team build Claude code? Today's deepdive covers this. An interesting take from them: "Mockups feel like a thing of the past when you can build 5-10 working prototypes per day." The full article: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-claude...

How do tech companies measure the impact of AI on software dev? Here's how GitHub, Google, Dropbox, Microsoft, Monzo, Atlassian, Adyen, Booking and Grammarly do it: More details on 9 other companies+trends in today's deepdive w @lauratacho.com at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-tech-c...

With the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) role trending in discussions, here's our deepdive from a month ago in @pragmaticengineer.com on the origins of the role, how it looks at Palantir, OpenAI and Ramp, and why the role is so hot *now*: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/forward-de...

State of the software engineering job market in 2025: Big Tech has started to hire more software engineers. Also: tenure at Big Tech has dramatically increased since the 2023 layoffs (surprising!) A lot more details in today's deepdive: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/state-of-t...

Interesting findings in The Pragmatic Engineer 2025 Survey: - JIRA: the single-most mentioned tool.. mentioned more than any language/IDE/other - Even though the survey was taken by developers, Figma is more used than Kubernetes or Cursor (!) Full: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pragma...

How do you build a great SDK? @quentin.pradet.me has been building and maintaining SDKs for a decade. In today's deepdive he walks through the most common approaches in the industry. Surprise: LLMs not a great fit for this kind of work! Full: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/building-g...

OpenAI's biggest-ever launch happened on 25 March: releasing ChatGPT Images. 100M new users in the first week 700M images generated in 7 days 1M new users/hour signing up at peek The eng team told us how exactly they pulled it off. All the details: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/chatgpt-im...

What is it like to build humanoid robots, as a software engineer? Today's deepdive goes into the software side of this industry-but before we do, we need to talk about hardware. With Sandor Felber, formerly Humanoid Robot Learning Researcher at MIT: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/humanoid-r...

The Pragmatic Engineer crossed one million subscribers! This is an improbable milestone. Today's deepdive covers the history behind it, who reads the publication, why it might be so popular, and what's next: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/one-million

Tech interviews feel like they are at inflection point: a lot of approaches and interview types that worked fine until now seem to be breaking down. Could we be heading back to pre-pandemic hiring practices? Today's deepdive: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/tech-hirin...

What is the MCP Protocol, and why is it spreading so rapidly across IDEs, with all major ones having added support (Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code, Zed, Cline and Neovim)? Today's deepdive goes into just this: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/mcp

Today's free deepdive is about the reality of tech interviews (and tech interviewing) in 2025. By Evan King and Stefan Mai (formerly at Meta, currently cofounders at Hello Interview, and getting a good pulse of the current market thanks to this): newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-realit...

Have you been hearing how "AI will replace software engineers"? Is it true? We talked with software engineers who not only are not "replaced" but picked up a new skillset working with LLMs. Building amazing things. A deepdive... into reality: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-enginee...

We want to capture an accurate snapshot of software engineering, today – and need your help! Tell us about your tech stack and get early access to the final report, plus extra analysis Please help out by taking this 5-15 minute survey: forms.gle/hoK7TtaH1hx3...

Imagine interviewing a candidate who looks like a very strong coder. Almost extending an offer. But turns out, the candidate is a deepfake. This actually happened with a startup called Vidoc Security - twice! Deepdive with all the details: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-fakers

Today's deepdive looks at 20,000+ data points to understand compensation ranges for software engineers in the US, UK and India. Here are details for India - the first time this data is ever published. Data courtesy of Levels.fyi See all data: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/trimodal

Today's deepdive: Robotics for software engineers. A deepdive with Sandor Felber, Humanoid Robot Learning Researcher at MIT. A walk through on how a typical enough robotics projects goes from planning, through development to shipping. Read it here: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/robotics

Exciting announcement: paid The Pragmatic Engineer subscribers now have access to: - 12 months of Perplexity Pro ($200 in value) - 3 months of Kagi Ultimate with ($75 in value) Read more about details, and how to claim these: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/free-kagi-...

A mental model on the differences between native mobile, React Native and Flutter. More in today's deepdive that is a broad overview of cross-platform mobile development trends and technologies: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/cross-plat...

How AI-assisted coding will change software engineering: hard truths. About how these AI tools really work and how they could be the start of the return of software, as a craft. Based on a guest post by @addyosmani.bsky.social. Read it here: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-ai-wil...

How Shopify built their innovative 3D Live Globe in 2024. Tech stack: React + R3F, some Rails, Go, Flink+Kafka Details on how the team went from idea, through design, to shipping and oncall: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/shopify-bl...

Today's deepdive: How GenAI tools are reshaping software engineering recruitment. An interesting find: cover letters are practically dead (90%+ of them are AI-generated, according to hiring managers we spoke to.) More: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-genai-...

A roundup of deepdives brought to you by The Pragmatic Engineer the last 12 months. Including industry trends, real-world engineering challenges, engineering culture deepdives, and more. Also: we have a Black Friday deal! See it here: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-pragmati...

Interesting: following a survey on social media asking software engineers what their favorite IDE is: the #1 mention was an upstart, Cursor. More details about this survey about the most popular IDEs with GenAI capabilities in today's deepdive: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ide-that-s...

The grouped collection of all The Pragmatic Engineer articles published the last year: docs.google.com/document/d/1... Also: we have a Black Friday deal!

The Pragmatic Engineer covers topics on software engineering, and stays away from politics. The day of the US election was a rare exception. We leaned into politics. Not "that" kind of politics: but tech workplace politics! Read it here: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-to-bec...

Startups hiring founding software engineers: where are they most likely to come from? The most common one happens to be: Google! More data and tips on how to hire from Big Tech to startups in today's deepdive: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/hiring-fro...

What is a "DST" and why should anyone building large and complex systems care? Today's deepdive goes into how to debug large, distributed systems, what a DST is, and how such a tool is built by Antithesis. Read it here: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/antithesis

Today is the day when we talk about politics. Not *that* politics... but the other kind! A guest post by Cindy Sridharan about how to be a more efficient software engineer at a mid-sized or large company. Read it here: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-to-bec...

Are you involved in tech interviews for software engineering roles (on either side of the table), and seeing how it’s being impacted by GenAI tooling, e.g. ChatGPT and similar? @pragmaticengineer.com wants to learn from you! DM me - or fill out forms.gle/1nw3wqvVzqux... - or both!

New deepdive: Hiring software engineers and engineering leaders from Big Tech (Part 1) A deepdive into why hiring Big Tech talent can be a bad idea for startups, a look at cases when it works, and what makes it hard to recruit from Big Tech.t newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/hiring-fro...