The Pragmatic Engineer

Great list! I also subscribe to Gergeley Orosz' "Pragmatic Engineer" which covers many AI topics now, and to Gary Marcus' substack, which tackles topics more from an LLM skeptic perspective. https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/ https://substack.com/@garymarcus Plus I subscribe to updates from Python packages like Langchain and PydanticAI to see what they're up to, since that's usually reflective of what's happening in broader industry. I'm not on X anymore so I can't follow many of the folks directly, but some of them (like Simon Willison) also post on BlueSky and Mastodon, fortunately. Some folks like Sebastian Raschka and Chip Huyen also post on LinkedIn. Kind of all over, but eventually, I see a good amount of what's happening.

The Pragmatic Engineer[0]. Gergely Orosz has very pragmatic, practical advice and stories about just being a successful software engineer. He also covers the differences of working at different places, and how to suss out if a work environment is likely to be a good one Full of great resources. Also access to a great job board. Big fan of his work thus far. [0]: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/

Gergely Orosz has been writing some great stuff - https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/

He was recently interviewed on Pragmatic Engineer, a podcast whose guests almost always have very impressive technical careers (the episode before him was Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, the VP of Data and Analytics at AWS and the episode after him is Brady Gooch, the Chief Scientist for Software Engineering at IBM) I agree that summarizing Peter as a "vibe coder" is unfair and disingenuous. The podcast paints his career as being interesting because we went from an impressive software developer, to an entrepreneur, to taking a significant break, to kind of obsessively creating Clawdbot. Worth a listen https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-creator-of-clawd-i-ship…

I listened to this recently which did a great job explaining the challenges that companies face when going 'on prem' and the hard problems that oxide is solving https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-history-of-servers-the-…

Ruby is #5 most used and #3 most loved programming language in the Pragmatic Engineer survey 2025: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pragmatic-engineer-2025… It means that basically, Ruby is huge in the SF Bay thanks to its adoption by startup founders, but it is a lot less popular outside of the Bay Area.

This podcast episode has a couple of guests from that company. Recommend to whoever interested in this company: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/twisting-the-rules-of-build…

TIL anyone making less than $1M/yr is budget. I was specifically calling out being able to do so (easily) from within the ORM itself, so I think implying that I don't know you can just call the database directly is a bit of a strawman. At the risk of going off on a tangent, the median dev salary is something like $100-150k/yr. So half of devs in the country make less than that. Gergely Orosz has a great discussion of this.[0] $1m/yr TC is the top 0.01% of the top tier of companies. Some FAANG-level tech firms are here but otherwise it's almost entirely IB, HFT, hedge funds, that sort of thing. I'd be shocked if anyone making close to $1m/yr TC is ever touching an ORM in their day job. [0] https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/trimodal-nature-of-tech-com…

We take a deep dive into video streaming architecture, tackling the complexities of live streaming at scale (at tens of millions of parallel streams) and the challenges engineers face in delivering seamless experiences. We talk about the following topics: • How large-scale live streaming architectures are designed • Tradeoffs in optimizing performance • Early warning signs of streaming failures and how to detect them • Why capacity planning for streaming is SO difficult • The technical hurdles of streaming in APAC regions Episode summary and transcript: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/live-streaming-at-world-rec…

Looks like a great addition to v0. Great to get a headstart and do quick iterations. My process at the moment is using v0 to get a functional prototype, then import the code to cursor and build and iterate it with my custom styling / language of choice / create components from scratch but instruct Cursor to "for component.vue take xyz from component.tsx) - (v0 basically limits you to React, Tailwind and shadcn) Recently came across this article where Gergely describes those 2 camps of "bootstrappers and iterators" - and that's basically what it is: v0/a0 for bootstrapping, cursor/copilot for actual coding https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-ai-will-change-software…

Although I no longer pay for a subscription and can't be certain, I used to have a paid subscription to The Pragmatic Engineer and I'm pretty sure the paragraph "brought to you by X, Y and Z" was still included in each post. I don't think there's any other advertising on the site. Might not quite meet your definition. https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/

It sounds like you have never heard of the Stacked Diffs workflow. Here is an overview: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/stacked-diffs It’s a perfectly reasonable preference to eschew this workflow, but definitely worth understanding the pros and cons.

Regarding their point on stacked diffs[0]: they're such a great feature imo and it's a shame GitHub etc don't support the functionality better. Often I'm working on a set of changes that ultimately have a large code diff. I don't think huge PRs are often a great idea as they introduce more risk, so it's often a good idea to break it up. But a reviewer is not always available to review each bite-sized PR, so you end up with a backlog of PRs that are ugly to review in the GitHub UI and you need to continually rebase them as each is merged. I quite liked the graphite.dev workflow for this, but it's a bit pricey. That and it only seems to work well if you can get your whole organisation to buy into using it. If GitHub etc integrated it as a native feature, I think that'd be great. [0]: As mentioned in the article, and https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/stacked-diffs

Here's recent insiders experience on developing Meta's Threads app on top of Instagram infra: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/building-metas-threads-app > In July of this year, Meta launched its latest mobile app, Threads, a microblogging service and new rival to X, formerly Twitter. In the first five days following its launch, the app achieved 100M downloads – a new record for the company by some margin. Meta’s previous record for new app installs in the first 5 days after launch was 1M. Built with a slightly larger team, considered an agile team: 3 product managers, 3 designers, about 60 engineers.

Strict Scrum is really not the default in tech. "How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum" is good reading here & matches my experience. https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/project-management-in-tech

Gergely Orosz's Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter for all aspects related to Tech career: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/

Do you mean for card payments, like the card network and authorization flow? I found this article really good from the systems design side although you might have to be a subscriber: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/payments-system

++ The Kaka https://thekaka.substack.com/ Also The Pragmatic Engineer: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/

The data/research mentioned in the tweet: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/more-follow-up-hiring-marke…

Paul Ford wrote a great piece about this in the NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/opinion/ai-software.html?unlocked_a… > November was, for me and many others in tech, a great surprise. Before, A.I. coding tools were often useful, but halting and clumsy. Now, the bot can run for a full hour and make whole, designed websites and apps that may be flawed, but credible. I spent an entire session of therapy talking about it. Max Woolf is a good one: https://minimaxir.com/2026/02/ai-agent-coding/ > The real annoying thing about Opus 4.6/Codex 5.3 is that it’s impossible to publicly say “Opus 4.5 (and the models that came after it) are an order of magnitude better than coding LLMs released just months before it” without sounding like an AI hype booster clickbaiting, but it’s the counterintuitive truth to my personal frustration. [...] A year ago, I was one of those skeptics who was very suspicious of the agentic hype. DHH - https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/dhhs-new-way-of-writing-cod… > Six months ago, in an episode of the Lex Fridman podcast, David shared how he doesn’t use AI tools to write code: he types out all his code. But things have changed a lot since then. > In this episode, we discuss his approach to building software, how it’s changed in the last six months, and why he now takes an agent-first approach, and how he barely writes any code by hand. Linus Torvalds, two weeks ago (though I don't have…

I've been in a similar position, a couple times in my career. I think its a natural trap to fall into when you are the kind of person that is good at bootstrapping projects to the point where they need a team to grow further, but not interested in management. A newsletter article (not mine) that helped crystallize my thinking around this, and helped me to explain it to non-technical folks in my current organization is this one: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineering-leadership-skil… Unfortunately its pay-walled, but Gergely (author) put some of the content in a tweet thread that is worth reading (https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1473353064358756352). If you look at the venn diagram posted in that thread, it sounds like you fall squarely in the "beware!!" zone. If you are like me, you fall into that zone, at least in part, because you are clinging to the some technical duties that you could give up, but since they are the foundation of why you enjoy your job, refuse to do so. Understanding this and your own strengths and weaknesses clearly, can really help frame possible solutions for you. I would spend some time reflecting (and it sounds like you already have) about what you want out of this job and your career in general. Perhaps you can propose to your management that you want to move into more of a "staff engineer" role. This may or may not work, and in the end, depending on the management at your company, you may have to move on to…

When I left high school for college (to pursue engineering) I was quite envious of my friends in the liberal arts - they were assigned papers all the time and I had no outlet for writing (something I enjoyed quite a bit). I have realized that written/technical communication is a great differentiator. I journal every day but specifically to your question I would say just start writing. Knowing your audience is key. I usually include an executive summary section at the top of any design document or product requirements document for a high level view of why people should care. Then I dive into a background or history to give context. At the end of the day it's a narrative and follows similar arcs - just with more direct prose and specific facts. I'll also drop this resource here from the Pragmatic Engineer newsletter. [0] [0]: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/software-engineering-rfc-an…

My take as a TPM and certified in Scrum: the better and more skilled the team members, the less you need Scrum and other frameworks. Scrum is great for teams composed of new developers who don't yet know how to work together, or teams at companies with poor culture. But the best teams are self-organized and don't necessarily need the guidance of Scrum. As Gergely mentioned, team autonomy is a big factor in job satisfaction (and performance). But, it can still be worth doing in high performance environments if specific things are needed. Part of being Agile is adapting processes to teams, and some Scrum processes can be useful (relative estimation for example) even when not doing Scrum itself. As an aside, Gergely has a newsletter[1] (of which this is one of the free articles) that is absolutely fantastic. It's $100/yr IIRC and well worth it. Gergely deep dives into topics around tech including hiring, structure, comp, etc. Gergely also has a book[2] that helped me get hired in SF when I moved here a couple of years ago. [1] - https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/about [2] - https://thetechresume.com

It’s not just Latin America. It’s also Canada, most of Europe, it’s India, Asia, and I’m hearing Africa also experiencing a similar pull. There’s a global talent shortage for experienced people in software engineering, and it’s spilling over everywhere. Remote work becoming the norm thanks to the pandemic, plus the rise of services like Remote.com, Deel and similar ones is making it much easier to hire remotely in most countries - and hiring outside the US is easier and cheaper: especially when you pay above the local market (but we’ll below the US one). I’ve been covering this trend from mid 2021 both in my newsletter (The Pragmatic Engineer) and my blog. From all evidence I gathered, we are in the most heated tech hiring market of all time, one that is hotter than during the Dotcom Boom (details in [1]). Having talked with closer to a hundred tech hiring managers the last six months across all geographies, the consensus is that it will get worse in Q1 2022 than before - and, obviously, this means better for many experienced engineers. And H2 2021 was hot enough with out-of-cycle compensation increases of 5-30% on top of annual raises at many tech companies, across all geographies [2]. [1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/advice-for-tech-workers-to-navigate… [2] https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/more-follow-up-hiring-marke…

This is roughly in line with where the thought leadership is: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/context-engineering-with-de… But you know, maybe you’re having a better experience? You should be a consultant.

The Pulse #119: Are LLMs making StackOverflow irrelevant? https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-134 The Fall of Stack Overflow https://observablehq.com/@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overflow

OSS does not necessarily mean the contributions are from "goodwill or part-time contributions". In fact, I would wager the most widely used OSS software is largely written by contributors paid to do so by corporations. At least for Linux, about 80% - 85% of contributions are from developers paid to do it (https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-linux-is-built-with-gre… Corporations have had many reasons to invest their money in open source software -- custom requirements, marketing / developer mindshare, commoditizing complements -- but as cutting edge LLMs get more and more expensive to train, you'd be hard-pressed to find corporations who will put in that kind of money if they cannot recoup their investments.

Given that Microsoft's overhead to actually landing features has, from what I've heard, long been more about dodging the cross-org and inter-org "guns" famously depicted in [0] and [1] than coding time... a 24% increase in merged PRs is massive! [0] https://static.ma.nu/publications/images/2013.07.12_new_york_times_org… [1] https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/i/138252015/drawing-the-famou…

I literally supported the claim by linking to this reporting, which effectively says the same thing. (And yes, I did make an HN account for this.) https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-is-meta-destroying-its-…

It's possible they are running at a loss at present. But in a recent podcast their founder said he believes inference is profitable, based on their experience serving models: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/opencode (search for "profitable")