The Pragmatic Engineer
The Pragmatic Engineer episodes converted into bullet points.
Episodes
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Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightower
Kelsey Hightower went from a self-taught technician installing DSL modems to becoming one of Google’s elite Distinguished Engineers, whom the CEO of Microsoft personally tried to recruit. Hightower’s career achievements are rooted in hard work and self-directed learning, and today he’s one of the...
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Building OpenCode with Dax Raad
OpenCode is one of the fastest-growing AI developer tools around, surging in just a few months from roughly 650,000 monthly active users to nearly 8 million, and almost 1M daily active users.
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Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhl
Rust is one of the most admired programming languages around – and also one of the hardest to learn. What makes developers stick with it?
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TypeScript, C# and Turbo Pascal with Anders Hejlsberg
Anders Hejlsberg is a living legend and one of the most influential programming language designers of all time. He created Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, and also TypeScript. As well as that, he spent nearly a decade at the pioneering dev tools company, Borland, and is now in his 30th year of working...
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Building Pi, and what makes self-modifying software so fascinating
Mario Zechner is the creator of Pi, a minimalist, self-modifying AI coding agent, that is the foundation upon which OpenClaw (created by Peter Steinberger) is built. Meanwhile, Armin Ronacher is the creator of Flask, and a longtime user of Pi. The pair are also friends.
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Designing Data-intensive Applications with Martin Kleppmann
Martin Kleppmann is a researcher and the author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications, one of the most influential books on modern distributed systems. As of this month, the second, heavily updated edition of the book is out.
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DHH: how to escape the "Apple bubble"
Watch the full podcast episode here: https://youtu.be/JiWgKRgdgpI
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DHH’s new way of writing code
David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) is the creator of Ruby on Rails and Omarchy, co-founder and CTO of 37signals (maker of Basecamp and HEY), and the author of several books including the best-seller, Remote: Office Not Required, co-written with Jason Fried.
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Martin Fowler & Kent Beck: Frameworks for reinventing software, again and again
With Martin Fowler and Kent Beck. At The Pragmatic Summit: www.pragmaticsummit.com. See a writeup of the talk: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/cycles-of-disruption-in-the-tech
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Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber’s first CTO)
Thuan Pham was Uber's first and longest-serving CTO, and today he’s the CTO of Faire, a B2B wholesale platform. Back when Thuan joined Uber, it had around 40 engineers and 30,000 rides per day, and the system crashed multiple times a week. Over seven years, he helped rebuild the system, move it f...
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Chip Huyen: Building when it feels like there's nothing left to build - The Pragmatic Summit
With Chip Huyen, author of AI Engineering. Recorded at The Pragmatic Summit, 11 Feb 2026: www.pragmaticsummit.com
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Nicole Forsgren: Leading high-performing engineering teams in the age of AI - The Pragmatic Summit
With Nicole Forsgren, author of Frictionless and Accelerate. At The Pragmatic Summit: www.pragmaticsummit.com
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Product-minded engineers in an AI-native world
With Tuomas Artman (cofounder, Linear), Michelle Lim (cofounder, Flint), and Drew Hoskins (author, The Product-Minded Engineer). At The Pragmatic Summit: www.pragmaticsummit.com
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Simon Willison: Engineering practices that make coding agents work - The Pragmatic Summit
With Simon Willison. Recorded 11 February 2026, at The Pragmatic Summit: www.pragmaticsummit.com. See extended notes from Simon in his excellent writeup: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/14/pragmatic-summit/
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Building WhatsApp with Jean Lee
How did a tiny team of 30 engineers build the world-famous messaging app more than a decade ago, and what can dev teams learn from that feat today? Jean Lee was engineer #19 at WhatsApp, joining when the company was still small, with almost no formal processes. She helped it scale to hundreds of...
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From IDEs to AI Agents with Steve Yegge
Steve Yegge has spent decades writing software and thinking about how the craft evolves. From his early years at Amazon and Google, to his influential blog posts, he has often been early at spotting shifts in how software gets built.
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Uber: Leading engineering through an agentic shift - The Pragmatic Summit
With Ty Smith and Anshu Chada, Uber Dev Platform. At The Pragmatic Summit: www.pragmaticsummit.com
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Ramp: Lessons from Building a New AI Product - The Pragmatic Summit
With Nik Koblov (EVP Engineering), Veeral Patel (Director, Applied AI and Spend), Will Koh (Staff Engineer, Applied AI), and Ian Tracey (Staff Software Engineer). Recorded at The Pragmatic Summit www.pragmaticsummit.com
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Lessons from building Vercel v0 and the d0 agent - The Pragmatic Summit
With Malte Ubl (CTO) at Vercel. Recorded at The Pragmatic Summit www.pragmaticsummit.com
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Building Claude Code with Boris Cherny
Boris Cherny is the creator and Head of Claude Code at Anthropic. He previously spent five years at Meta as a Principal Engineer and is the author of the book Programming TypeScript.
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Welcome - The Pragmatic Summit
Welcome address at The Pragmatic Summit, on 11 February 2026, in San Francisco. www.pragmaticsummit.com
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Mitchell Hashimoto’s new way of writing code
How has the day-to-day workflow of Mitchell Hashimoto changed, thanks to AI tools?
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Building world-class engineering teams in the age of AI - The Pragmatic Summit
With Thomas Dohmke (cofounder & CEO, Entire, previously CEO at GitHub) and Rajeev Rajan (CTO, Atlassian).
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Data vs Hype: How Orgs Actually Win with AI - The Pragmatic Summit
With Laura Tacho, CTO. Keynote at The Pragmatic Summit
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OpenAI: How AI is reshaping the craft of building software - The Pragmatic Summit
Tibo Sottiaux (Head of Engineering, Codex, OpenAI) and Vijaye Raji (CTO of Applications, OpenAI) at The Pragmatic Summit: www.pragmaticsummit.com. Watch sessions, with Q&A: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pragmatic-summit-recordings
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The programming language after Kotlin – with the creator of Kotlin
Andrey Breslav is the creator of Kotlin and the founder of CodeSpeak, a new programming language that aims to reduce boilerplate by replacing trivial code with concise, plain-English descriptions. He led Kotlin’s design at JetBrains through its early releases, shaping both the language and its co...
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The third golden age of software engineering – thanks to AI, with Grady Booch
Every few decades, software engineering is declared “dead” or on the verge of being automated away. We’ve heard versions of this story before. But what if it’s just the start of a new “golden age” of a different type of software engineering, like it has been many times before?
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The creator of OpenClaw: "I ship code I don't read"
Peter Steinberger ships more code than I’ve seen a single person do: in January, he was at more than 6,600 commits alone. As he puts it: “From the commits, it might appear like it's a company. But it’s not. This is one dude sitting at home having fun."
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How AWS S3 is built
Amazon S3 is one of the largest distributed systems ever built, storing and serving data for a significant portion of the internet. Behind its simple interfaces hides an enormous amount of engineering work, careful tradeoffs, and long-term thinking.
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The history of servers, the cloud, and what’s next – with Oxide
How have servers and the cloud evolved in the last 30 years, and what might be next? Bryan Cantrill was a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems during both the Dotcom Boom and the Dotcom Bust. Today, he is the co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer, where he works on modern server infrastructure.
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Why Rust is coming to the Linux kernel
In April 2024, Linux Kernel developer (and Linux Foundation Fellow) Greg KH talked about why Rust is going to come to the Linux kernel. The full podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7agB1vOl-wg
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Being a founding engineer at an AI startup
Michelle Lim joined Warp as engineer number one and is now building her own startup, Flint. She brings a strong product-first mindset shaped by her time at Facebook, Slack, Robinhood, and Warp. Michelle shares why she chose Warp over safer offers, how she evaluates early-stage opportunities, and...
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Code security for software engineers
As software engineers, what should we know about writing secure code?
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How AI will change software engineering – with Martin Fowler
Martin Fowler is one of the most influential people within software architecture, and the broader tech industry. He is the Chief Scientist at Thoughtworks and the author of Refactoring and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, and several other books. He has spent decades shaping how e...
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Netflix’s Engineering Culture
What’s it like to work as a software engineer inside one of the world’s biggest streaming companies?
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From Swift to Mojo and high-performance AI Engineering with Chris Lattner
Chris Lattner is one of the most influential engineers of the past two decades. He created the LLVM compiler infrastructure and the Swift programming language – and Swift opened iOS development to a broader group of engineers. With Mojo, he’s now aiming to do the same for AI, by lowering the barr...
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Beyond Vibe Coding with Addy Osmani
Addy Osmani is Head of Chrome Developer Experience at Google, where he leads teams focused on improving performance, tooling, and the overall developer experience for building on the web. If you’ve ever opened Chrome’s Developer Tools bar, you’ve definitely used features Addy has built. He’s also...
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Google’s engineering culture
What is it really like to be an engineer at Google?
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Python, Go, Rust, TypeScript and AI with Armin Ronacher
Armin Ronacher is the creator of the Flask framework for Python, was one of the first engineers hired at Sentry, and now the co-founder of a new startup. He has spent his career thinking deeply about how tools shape the way we build software. In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast, he...
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High growth startups: Uber and CloudKitchens with Charles-Axel Dein
What does it take to do well at a hyper-growth company? In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I sit down with Charles-Axel Dein, one of the first engineers at Uber, who later hired me there. Since then, he’s gone on to work at CloudKitchens. He’s also been maintaining the popular Professiona...
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Code Complete with Steve McConnell
The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast is back with the Fall 2025 season. Expect new episodes to be published on most Wednesdays, looking ahead.
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The state of VC within software and AI startups – with Peter Walker
See charts referenced in the video: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-state-of-vc-in-2025 . Many of the trends we discuss seem to originate from the end of zero interest rates (ZIRP). See this deepdive for more details: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/zirp
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Measuring the impact of AI on software engineering – with Laura Tacho
There’s no shortage of bold claims about AI and developer productivity, but how do you separate signal from noise?
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Amazon, Google and Vibe Coding with Steve Yegge
Steve Yegge is known for his writing and “rants”, including the famous “Google Platforms Rant” and the evergreen “Get that job at Google” post. He spent 7 years at Amazon and 13 at Google, as well as some time at Grab before briefly retiring from tech. Now out of retirement, he’s building AI deve...
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What is a Principal Engineer at Amazon? With Steve Huynh
Steve Huynh (@ALifeEngineered ) spent 17 years at Amazon, including four as a Principal Engineer. In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I join Steve in his studio for a deep dive into what the Principal role actually involves, why the path from Senior to Principal is so tough, and how even s...
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How Linux is built with Greg Kroah-Hartman
This is a re-release of the original upload, and fixes audio issues. See the original release (with poor audio) here: https://youtu.be/7WbREHtc5sU. I (Gergely) apologize for the original audio issues.
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How AI is changing software engineering at Shopify with Farhan Thawar
What happens when a company goes all in on AI?
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Software engineering with LLMs in 2025: reality check (at LDX3 by LeadDev)
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 long-time software engineers, including Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, and others.
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Things you didn't know about GitHub - with CEO Thomas Dohmke
GitHub recently turned 17 years old—but how did it start, how has it evolved, and what does the future look like as AI changes how developers work?
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TDD, AI agents and coding with Kent Beck
• Kent Beck is one of the most influential figures in modern software development. Creator of Extreme Programming (XP), co-author of The Agile Manifesto, and a pioneer of Test-Driven Development (TDD), he’s shaped how teams write, test, and think about code.
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50 Years of Microsoft and Developer Tools with Scott Guthrie
How has Microsoft changed since its founding in 1975, especially in how it builds tools for developers?
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From Software Engineer to AI Engineer – with Janvi Kalra
What does it take to land a job as an AI Engineer—and thrive in the role?
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How Kubernetes is Built with Kat Cosgrove
Kubernetes is the second-largest open-source project in the world. What does it actually do—and why is it so widely adopted?
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Building Windsurf with Varun Mohan
What happens when LLMs meet real-world codebases? In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I am joined by Varun Mohan, CEO and Co-Founder of Windsurf. Varun talks me through the technical challenges of building an AI-native IDE (Windsurf) and how these tools are changing the way software gets...
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How to work better with Product, as an Engineer with Ebi Atawodi
How do you get product and engineering to truly operate as one team? Today, I’m joined by Ebi Atawodi, Director of Product Management at YouTube Studio, and a former product leader at Netflix and Uber.
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Building Reddit’s iOS and Android app
Reddit’s native mobile apps are more complex than most of us would assume: both the iOS and Android apps are about 2.5 million lines of code, have 500+ screens, and a total of around 200 native iOS and Android engineers work on them.
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Working at Amazon as a software engineer – with Dave Anderson
What is it like to work at Amazon as a software engineer? Dave Anderson spent over 12 years at Amazon working closely with engineers on his teams: starting as an Engineering Manager (or, SDM in Amazon lingo) and eventually becoming a Director of Engineering. In this episode, he shares a candid lo...
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The Philosophy of Software Design – with John Ousterhout
Brought to by: • CodeRabbit — Cut code review time and bugs in half https://www.coderabbit.ai. Use the code PRAGMATIC to get one month free. • Modal — The cloud platform for building AI applications https://modal.com/pragmatic
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Stacked diffs and tooling at Meta with Tomas Reimers
Why did Meta build its own internal developer tooling instead of using industry-standard solutions like GitHub? Tomas Reimers, former Meta engineer and co-founder of Graphite, joins the show to talk about Meta's custom developer tools – many of which were years ahead of the industry.
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Building Figma Slides with Noah Finer and Jonathan Kaufman
How do you take a new product idea, and turn it into a successful product? Figma Slides started as a hackathon project a year and a half ago – and today it’s a full-on product, with more than 4.5M slide decks created by users. I’m joined by two founding engineers on this project: Jonathan Kaufman...
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Developer Experience at Uber with Gautam Korlam
In today’s episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I am joined by my former Uber colleague, Gautam Korlam. Gautam is the Co-Founder of Gitar, an agentic AI startup that automates code maintenance. Gautam was mobile engineer no. 9 at Uber and founding engineer for the mobile platform team – and so he l...
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Design-first software engineering: Craft – with Balint Orosz
Not many people know that I have a brother: Balint Orosz. Balint is also in tech, but in many ways, is the opposite of me. While I prefer working on backend and business logic, he always thrived in designing and building UIs. While I opted to work at more established companies, he struck out on h...
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The man behind the Big Tech comics – with Manu Cornet
In today’s episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I am joined by a senior software engineer and cartoonist, Manu Cornet. Manu spent over a decade at Google, doing both backend and frontend development. He also spent a year and a half at Twitter before Elon Musk purchased it and rebranded it to X. But...
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Developer productivity with Nicole Forsgren (the creator of DORA)
In today’s episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I am joined by one of the foremost experts in developer productivity: Dr. Nicole Forsgren. Nicole is the creator of the widely adopted DORA and SPACE frameworks, co-author of the award-winning book Accelerate and the DevOps Handbook (2nd edition), and...
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Live streaming at world-record scale with Ashutosh Agrawal (ex-Jio / Disney+ Hotstar)
In May 2023, a live streaming world record was set with 32 million concurrent viewers watching the finale of the Indian Premier League cricket finale. A chat with the architect behind this system: Ashutosh Agrawal, formerly Chief Architect of JioCinema (and currently Staff Software Engineer at Go...
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AI Engineering with Chip Huyen
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. Chip has worked as a researcher at Netflix, was a core developer at NVIDIA (building NeMo, NVIDIA’...
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Two developers built a game that sold 1M copies. How?
In today’s episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I’m joined by Jonas Tyroller, one of the developers behind Thronefall, a minimalist indie strategy game that blends tower defense and kingdom-building, now available on Steam. Built by just two developers, and priced at $12.99, the game sold 1M copies...
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Observability: the present and future, with Charity Majors
In today's episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I'm joined by Charity Majors, a well-known observability expert – as well as someone with strong and grounded opinions. Charity is the co-author of "Observability Engineering" and brings extensive experience as an operations and database engineer and...
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“The Coding Machine” at Meta – with Michael Novati
In today’s episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I’m joined by Michael Novati, Co-founder and CTO of Formation. Before launching Formation, Michael spent eight years at Meta, where he was recognized as the top code committer company-wide for several years. The “Coding Machine” archetype was modeled...
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Confessions of a Big Tech recruiter – with Blake Stockman
In today’s episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I catch up with one of the best tech recruiters I’ve had the opportunity to work with: Blake Stockman, a former colleague of mine from Uber. Blake built a strong reputation in the recruiting world, working at tech giants like Google, Meta, and Uber. H...
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Shipping projects at Big Tech with Sean Goedecke
In today’s episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I’m joined by Sean Goedecke, Staff Software Engineer at GitHub. Sean is widely known for his viral blog post, “How I ship projects at big tech companies.” In our conversation, he shares how to successfully deliver projects in large tech companies.
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How Notion Builds Their iOS and Android Apps
In today’s exciting episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I am joined by two founding native mobile engineers from Notion: Austin Louden and Karn Saheb. Austin and Karn joined Notion in 2019 when Notion started to revamp its iOS and Android apps. Today, Notion's mobile apps are used by tens of milli...
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Evolution of software architecture with the co-creator of UML (Grady Booch)
Welcome to The Pragmatic Engineer! Today, I’m thrilled to be joined by Grady Booch, a true legend in software development. Grady is the Chief Scientist for Software Engineering at IBM, where he leads groundbreaking research in embodied cognition. He’s the mind behind several object-oriented desig...
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Linear: move fast with little process (with first Engineering Manager Sabin Roman)
Linear is a small startup with a big impact: 10,000+ companies use their project and issue-tracking system, including 66% of Forbes Top 50 AI companies. Founded in 2019, the company raised $52M in funding and is profitable, and full-remote. How did they pull this off with just 25 engineers?
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Promotions and tooling at Google (with Irina Stanescu, Ex-Google)
In today’s episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I’m joined by Irina Stanescu, a seasoned engineer with over 14 years in software engineering and engineering leadership roles at tech companies like Google and Uber. Now an engineering leadership coach, Irina helps tech professionals build impactful c...
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Twisting the rules of building software: Bending Spoons (the team behind Evernote)
You may not be familiar with Bending Spoons, but I guarantee you’ve encountered some of their well-known products, like Evernote and Meetup.
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Efficient scaleups in 2024 vs 2021: Sourcegraph (with CEO & Co-founder Quinn Slack)
On today’s episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I’m joined by Quinn Slack, CEO and co-founder of Sourcegraph, a leading code search and intelligence platform. Quinn holds a degree in Computer Science from Stanford and is deeply passionate about coding: to the point that he still codes every day! He...
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AI tools for software engineers, but without the hype – with Simon Willison (Co-Creator of Django)
On the first episode of the Pragmatic Engineer Podcast, I am joined by Simon Willison. Simon is one of the best-known software engineers experimenting with LLMs to boost his own productivity: he’s been doing this for more than three years, blogging about it in the open.
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The software engineering industry in 2024: Q&A
Q&A for my keynote at Craft Conference 2024. See the keynote talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpPPHDxR9aM
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The software engineering industry in 2024: what changed, why, and what is next (Craft Conference)
See the slides and accompanying article here: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/what-is-old-is-new-again
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Systems Design Interview: Volume 2 Review and Payments Chapter Deepdive
Note that none of the below links are affiliate links or sponsored. See my ethics statement on the lack of such links: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/ethics-statement
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Getting Into Big Tech: From Startups in Mexico to Amazon and Microsoft as a Software Engineer
Watch the second part of the conversation, with my advice to get to the senior level at Big Tech here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFsAh_1N_fk
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How to Negotiate a Big Tech Offer as a Software Engineer - with @RahulPandeyrkp
Rahul worked at a startup, at Pinterest and is now a staff engineer at Facebook. He negotiated close to a dozen offers. We share practical advice on how you can - and should! - negotiate Big Tech software engineering offers: both fro the side of the candidate, and from the viewpoint of the hiring...
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From Software Engineer to Engineering Manager with Annie Vella
Will you become non-technical after you become a manager? Should you say "yes" to manager opportunities early on in your career? One of the best engineering managers I know, Annie Vella shares her story and learnings on becoming an engineering manager after being a software engineer for many years.
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The Trimodal Nature of Software Engineer Compensation: Why Positions Pay a (Very) Different Salary
There can be a 2-5x difference in compensation / salary for the same software engineering position, in the same location in Europe and Canada. But why?
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Confessions from a Big Tech Hiring Manager: Tips for Software Engineering Interviews
If you enjoyed this video, you'll probably like my weekly newsletter, The Pragmatic Engineer. It's the #1 technology newsletter on Substack. Sign up here: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/about
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Why is The Uber App So Large?? (From an ex-Uber mobile engineer & manager)
"Why is the Uber app so large?" I worked on Uber mobile apps for quite a while, so I can give an honest and detailed answer.
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A Philosophy of Software Design: Book Review and Verdict
Is the book, A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout any good? Review from a software engineer and engineering manager.
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Performance Review: Biases that Could Hurt You and How to Counter Them (from a Manager)
Your performance review might have biases when your manager delivers it to you. How can you spot them, and what can you do to counter them, and get a more fair review?