Software engineering at Big Tech and startups, from the inside. Deepdives with experienced engineers and tech professionals who share their hard-earned lessons, interesting stories and advice they have on building software. Especially relevant for software engineers and engineering leaders:…
Brought to You By: • turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable. • Entire – Git hosting, rebuilt for the agentic era. Every agent session, prompt and tool calls: stored in your repo. • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. — Sam Newman wrote one of the most-read books about microservices (“ Building Microservices ”), but he calls them an architecture of “last resort.” In this episode of the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, Sam…
Brought to You By: • turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable • Linear – the product development system for teams and agents • WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. — How is it that a software veteran who regularly shipped ~100K of database-grade code to production each year, pre-AI, feels like he’s even more productive today, with no drop in quality? Peter Mattis is co-founder and CTO of Cockroach Labs , and an original creator of GIMP. He also worked on Gmail and distributed storage at…
Brought to You By: • turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable. • O'Reilly Early Release: Scaling AI Adoption in Engineering – a free book on how to adopt and scale AI in a pragmatic way inside of engineering orgs. Complimentary, thanks to Antithesis. • Entire – every agent prompt, tool call, stored in your repo, and mirrored. — What can everyone else learn from designers and design engineers? As it turns out, there’s plenty, as I discovered when one of the best design engineers in the industry, Maggie Appleton , came…
Brought to You By: • turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable • Linear – the product development system for teams and agents • WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. — Why is the “grill-me” skill so popular, and why does its creator swear by the importance of software fundamentals? Matt Pocock created this widely-used skill – and many others – alongside being an educator, content creator, and engineer. His latest course is AI Hero , and he previously created the Total TypeScript course that…
Brought to You By: • turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • Entire – Git hosting, rebuilt for the agentic era. Every agent session, prompt and tool calls: stored in your repo. — Tibo Sottiaux is one of the engineers who created Codex, and today, he heads up the Core Products & Platform org at OpenAI which also includes Codex. He’s also one of the most public faces of Codex due to his…
Brought to You By: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • Sentry – application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers. • turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable. — There can be few people around who care about software performance more than today’s pod guest, Casey Muratori . He’s a programmer and videogame developer, founder of Molly Rocket , and creator of Handmade Hero – a long-running series…
Brought to You By: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • Google Cloud Run – run your code and host LLMs directly on top of Google’s scalable infrastructure, without having to worry about managing infra. • Sentry – application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers — Addy Osmani spent more than 14 years at Google, working on Chrome, DevTools, Core Web Vitals, and most recently, AI developer experience. If you've ever opened Chrome DevTools, or optimized a page for Core…
Brought to You By: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. • Buildkite – CI software built to absorb whatever your coding agents throw at the build queue — In 2025, it was rational to be skeptical about AI, but in 2026 it’s clear that AI is changing all of the industry, and there’s less and less place for skepticism. This take is from one of my favorite voices in software reliability and observability: Charity Majors, CTO and cofounder…
Brought to You By: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable. • WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. — There’s a popular theory that AI will finally make formal verification mainstream because mathematical proof of correctness will be needed when machines write most or all of the code. But will this happen? Today, I’m talking with one of the best people to…
Brought to You By: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • Buildkite – CI software built to absorb whatever your coding agents throw at the build queue. • Sentry – application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers. — Knowing how LLM contexts work and how to work around context limitations – aka “context engineering” – is becoming more important for software engineers working with LLMs. Let’s look into what works and what doesn’t, today. In this episode of The Pragmatic…
Brought to You By: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. — In this special “ask me anything” episode of Pragmatic Engineer podcast, I am in the hot seat facing questions sent in by subscribers that are read out by guest Volodymyr Giginiak, CTO and cofounder of Wordsmith AI , a legal tech startup (note: I’m an investor ) . I tackle your questions on the software industry, AI, hiring, engineering organizations, career growth, the business model of the Pragmatic Engineer, and more. We also discuss where…
Brought to You By: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable. • WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. — Few have made as big an impact on software engineering as this week’s guest on the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, Kent Beck. He created Extreme Programming, pioneered test-driven development (TDD), co-created JUnit, and is one of the authors of the famous ‘Agile…
Brought to You By: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • Sentry – application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers • Google Cloud Run – run your code and host LLMs directly on top of Google’s scalable infrastructure, without having to worry about managing infra. — Navdeep Singh – oftentimes better known as NeetCode – is the creator of NeetCode.io , one of the most popular coding interview preparation platforms and YouTube channels for software engineers. Before…
Brought to You By: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. • turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable. — Robert Erez is a principal engineer at Octopus Deploy, and a longtime expert in CI/CD, deployment systems, and software delivery. Rob and I were also once colleagues on the Skype web team, working on large-scale deployments and release processes. In this…
Brought to You By: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • Buildkite – CI software built to absorb whatever your coding agents throw at the build queue • Sentry – application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers — 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…
Brought to You By: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. • turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable. — 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. In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast, we meet Dax Raad,…
Brought to You By: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • Sentry – application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers • Craft Conference : join Gergely, Kent Beck, Hillel Wayne and others at the conference dedicated to the art and science of software delivery craft. — Rust is one of the most admired programming languages around – and also one of the hardest to learn. What makes developers stick with it? In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast, I sit down…
Brought to You By: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. • turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable. — 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,…
Brought to You By: • Statsig — The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. • Sonar – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for automated code review • WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. — 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. I sat down with Mario and Armin for the latest episode of the Pragmatic…
Brought to You By: • Statsig — The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. • Sonar – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for automated code review • WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. — 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 . In this episode of Pragmatic Engineer, we discuss Martin’s career in tech building startups, how he ended up writing…
Brought to You By: • Statsig — The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. • Sonar – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for automated code review • WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. — 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 . Six months ago, in an episode of the Lex Fridman podcast , David shared how he doesn’t use…
Brought to You By: • Statsig — The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. • Sonar – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for automated code review • WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. — 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 from a monolith to microservices, and scaled the…
Brought to You By: • Statsig — The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. • Sonar – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for automated code review • WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. — 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 millions of users, went through the $19B…
Brought to You By: • Statsig — The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. • Sonar – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for automated code review • WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. — 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. In this episode of Pragmatic Engineer , I talk with Steve about how AI is changing engineering work, why he…
Brought to You By: • Statsig — The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. • Sonar – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for automated code review • WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. — 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 . In this episode of Pragmatic Engineer , we went through how Claude Code was built and what it means when engineers no longer write most of the code themselves. We…
Brought to You By: • Statsig — The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. • Sonar – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for automated code review • WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. — How has the day-to-day workflow of Mitchell Hashimoto changed, thanks to AI tools? Mitchell Hashimoto is one of the most influential infrastructure engineers of our time, and is one of the most pragmatic builders I’ve met. He is the co-founder of HashiCorp and creator of Ghostty. In this episode, we talk about how he got into software…
Brought to You By: • Statsig — The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. • Sonar – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for automated code review • WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. — 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 compiler as Kotlin grew into a core part of the…
Brought to You By: • Statsig — The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. • Sonar – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for automated code review • WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. — 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? In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I’m joined once again by…
Brought to You By: • Statsig — The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. • Sonar – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for automated code review • WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. — 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." How does he do it? Peter Steinberger is the creator of Clawdbot (as of yesterday: renamed to…
Brought to You By: • Statsig — The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. • Sonar – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for automated code review • WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. — 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. In this episode, I sit down with Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, VP of Data and Analytics at AWS, who has…
About The Pragmatic Engineer
Software engineering at Big Tech and startups, from the inside. Deepdives with experienced engineers and tech professionals who share their hard-earned lessons, interesting stories and advice they have on building software. Especially relevant for software engineers and engineering leaders: useful for those working in tech. newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
The Pragmatic Engineer is a English tech & science podcast from Gergely Orosz. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.
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