The Pulse #144: Rare look into AWS’s PR/FAQ process
Also: ChatGPT is potentially more efficient than 95% of in-house GenAI projects, Google cuts TLM positions, and more.| The Pragmatic Engineer
Also: ChatGPT is potentially more efficient than 95% of in-house GenAI projects, Google cuts TLM positions, and more.| The Pragmatic Engineer
In-person algorithmic interviews are not disappearing from Big Tech and many top scaleups and startups, so it’s useful to know how to succeed at them. Advice and tactics from Mike Mroczka| The Pragmatic Engineer
Also: Microsoft’s US compensation bands leaked, Tailwind CSS team gets burnt using Claude Code, Meta and OpenAI in talent & comp war, and more| The Pragmatic Engineer
Which tools do software engineers use for project management, communication and collaboration, databases and backend infrastructure? Reader survey with analysis, based on 3,000+ responses| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Also: Figma’s in-demand IPO could mark the end of the “tech IPO winter”, Amazon’s spec-driven development approach with Kiro, and more| The Pragmatic Engineer
Startups and scaleups are on a hiring spree for a software engineering role pioneered by Palantir. A deepdive into this role, and why FDEs are so popular in 2025| The Pragmatic Engineer
How are VC funding, hiring, and founder trends shifting—and what does it mean for software engineers at startups? Extensive data discussed with Peter Walker, Head of Insights at Carta.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
A guide to creating SDKs that devs – and LLMs – will find a breeze to use, plus an overview of modern approaches for building and maintaining SDKs. By veteran SDK engineer, Quentin Pradet| The Pragmatic Engineer
Also: mystery solved about dozens of outages on 10 June, reflections on a year at OpenAI, and more| The Pragmatic Engineer
Laura Tacho, CTO of DX, shares findings from 180+ companies on how AI is really impacting dev productivity, what most teams get wrong, and why measuring dev experience first is critical.| The Pragmatic Engineer
What are the lessons of large outages at Heroku, Google Cloud, and Neon? Plus, how responses to outages can be as informative as incidents themselves…| The Pragmatic Engineer
Steve Yegge shares why Google struggles with platforms, how AI coding is deceptively hard, and why the "AI Fixer" role could be one spreading inside tech companies, in the future.| The Pragmatic Engineer
Which tools do software engineers use for backend development, frontend, infrastructure, AI tooling, and more, today? Reader survey, with feedback and analysis, based on 3,000+ responses| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Also: the complicated story of the Windsurf sale, beginning of the end for VC-subsidized tokens, and more.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Finally, relief: tax regulation hurting the US tech industry is striked off for good - for the most part, that is.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Finally, relief: tax regulation hurting the US tech industry is striked off for good - for the most part, that is. Also: why Meta is “going to war” to poach AI researchers from OpenAI, and more.| The Pragmatic Engineer
Former Amazon Principal Engineer Steve Huynh shares what it takes to reach the Principal level, why the jump Principal is so tough at Amazon, and how Amazon’s scale and culture shaped his career.| The Pragmatic Engineer
Helpful software engineering, AI engineering, and robotics fundamentals to know for getting into robotics. Also: advice about studying this exciting discipline at university| The Pragmatic Engineer
Shopify's Head of Engineering, Farhan Thawar, shares how the company is using internal LLMs, unlimited AI tokens, and custom tooling to figure out how to use AI tools more efficiently - faster| The Pragmatic Engineer
How are devs at AI startups and in Big Tech using AI tools, and what do they think of them? A broad overview of the state of play in tooling, with Anthropic, Google, Amazon, and others| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
A software engineer worked at several AI startups at the same time, without his employers knowing anything about it. Then one frustrated founder who hired him went public…| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
How to think about today’s AI tools, approaches that work well, and concerns about using them for development. Guest post by Birgitta Böckeler, Distinguished Engineer at Thoughtworks| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Kent Beck—creator of Extreme Programming and co-author of the Agile Manifesto—reflects on decades of coding, from the birth of TDD to his experiments with AI tools shaping software’s future.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Building a system where hundreds of devs simulate being an AI would have been silly in 2024. Also: stock vesting changes at NVIDIA and Anthropic, a reminder on how vibe-coded apps are wonky, and more| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Cursor has grown 100x in load in just a year, sees 1M+ QPS for its data layer, and serves billions of code completions, daily. A deepdive into how it’s built with cofounder, Sualeh Asif| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Also: new trend of higher base salaries for AI engineers than software engineers, Morgan Stanley shows AI is helpful for rewriting legacy codebases, and more.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
There’s a lot of talk about “vibe coding”, but is it just a vague term for prototyping, or could vibes change how we build software?| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Keeping a pulse on the software engineering industry, every Thursday. Insights, patterns and trends within Big Tech and startups. Exclusive analysis of what is happening, and why. Click to read The Pragmatic Engineer, a Substack publication with millions of subscribers.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Kat Cosgrove shares what Kubernetes actually does, how it’s structured and scaled, and why it’s become one of the most successful open-source projects in the world.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
ChatGPT Images is OpenAI’s biggest launch yet, with 100 million NEW users generating 700 million images in the first week. But how was it built? A deepdive with OpenAI’s engineering team| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Varun Mohan, CEO of Windsurf, shares how building an AI-native IDE is reshaping software development—from optimizing LLM latency to enabling non-engineers to ship code.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Stanford professor John Ousterhout explains why thoughtful software design matters more than ever as AI tools transform coding practices and developer workflows.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
The Model Context Protocol - that extends IDEs’ AI capabilities - is gaining rapid popularity. Why is this, and why should us developers pay attention to it?| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Interview processes are changing in a tech market that’s both cooling AND heating up at the same time. A deepdive with Hello Interview founders, Evan King and Stefan Mai| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
What does AI engineering look like in practice? Hands-on examples and learnings from software engineers turned “AI engineers” at seven companies| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
A full-remote security startup nearly hired a backend engineer who doesn’t exist, after a candidate used an AI filter as an on-screen disguise in video interviews. Learnings for tech companies| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Deepdive into the distribution of software engineering compensation, based on more than 20,000 data points from Levels.fyi| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
More startups and scaleups are hiring engineers and engineering leaders. Advice for tech professionals on how to get noticed by specialist recruitment companies – from two specialist recruiters| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
On today’s episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I’m joined by Chip Huyen, a computer scientist, author of the freshly published O’Reilly book AI Engineering, and an expert in applied machine learning.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
A deep dive into the most popular frameworks: React Native, Flutter, native-first, and web-based technologies, and how to pick the right approach| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Also: Apple fires staff over fake charities scam, AI models just keep improving, a middle manager burnout possibly on the horizon, and more.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
In today’s episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I’m joined by Blake Stockman, former tech recruiter at Google, Meta, Uber, and YC.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Big Tech and startups, from the inside. Highly relevant for software engineers and managers, useful for those working in tech. Click to read The Pragmatic Engineer, a Substack publication with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
A technical deep dive into concepts involved in developing a fun game| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
The past 15 years saw the lowest interest rates in modern history, and this “zero interest-rate period” (ZIRP) meant growing tech companies was easy. With this period over, what changes for startups?| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Also: why GitLab is seeking a buyer, how Alexa got left behind in conversational AI, and Cloudflare offering customers less AI – because those customers want this.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
How do software engineers utilize GenAI tools in their software development workflow? We sidestep the hype, and look to the reality of tech professionals using LLMs for coding and other tasks.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Just one year after its launch, ChatGPT had more than 100M weekly users. In order to meet this explosive demand, the team at OpenAI had to overcome several scaling challenges. An exclusive deepdive.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Why does a similar position have 2-4x compensation differences, in the same market? A closer look at the trimodal model I published in 2021. More data, and new observations.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Also: what NVIDIA becoming the world’s most valuable company says about AI, controversy at Slack and Adobe about terms and conditions in the GenAI era, and more| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a common building block of AI software engineering. A deep dive into what it is, its limitations, and some alternative use cases. By Ross McNairn.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
A deep dive into the ever-changing field of security engineering; a domain that can feel intimidating to some software engineers. With Nielet D'Mello, security engineer at Datadog.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
The end of 10+ years of 0% interest rates is set to change the tech industry. What do higher rates mean for software engineering jobs, developers, and careers; and how can you prepare for this shift?| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
We are in the most heated tech hiring market of all time. Here’s what you need to do and what companies do which are still growing.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
How much of a productivity boost do GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT give software engineers? Results from a survey with over 170 respondents, and a look into what to expect from AI coding tools.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
A deep dive into how the dev team works at Figma and their “build with deliberation, build with pride” engineering culture. As told by Figma’s CTO, Kris Rasmussen.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Learnings and insights from a principal engineer at LinkedIn and veteran of developer tools and productivity, Max Kanat-Alexander.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Since it arrived a year ago, ChatGPT has been shipping at breakneck speed. Evan Morikawa, the first engineering manager for this group shares what ChatGPT – and OpenAI – do differently.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
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?| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
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| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
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.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
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.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
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.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
The reasons for performance calibrations, budgets, bucketing and stack ranking approaches.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Big Tech and startups, from the inside. Highly relevant for software engineers and managers, useful for those working in tech. Click to read The Pragmatic Engineer, a Substack publication with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.| newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
