The Pragmatic Engineer
by Gergely Orosz
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
Episodes
Scaling Slack and GitHub with Maude Lemaire
<p><strong>Brought to You By:</strong></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://antithesis.com/pragmatic"><strong>Antithesis</strong></a> – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://turbopuffer.com/pragmatic"><strong>turbopuffer</strong></a><strong> </strong>– a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable.</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="http://entire.io/pragmatic"><strong>Entire</strong></a> – The Git forge for agent-human collaboration. Built for the scale and throughput of agentic coding.</p><p>—</p><p>What is involved in scaling up large, popular products at places like Slack and GitHub? </p><p>We get an insider’s view on this from <a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/lemairemaude">Maude Lemaire</a>, a principal engineer and author of<a target="_blank" href="https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/refactoring-at-scale/9781492075523/"> ‘</a><a target="_blank" href="https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/refactoring-at-scale/9781492075523/"><em>Refactoring at Scale: Regaining Control of Your Codebase</em></a>.’ She spent nearly eight years at Slack, where she led the backend performance infrastructure team, before joining GitHub to tackle database scaling challenges. Most recently, she worked on improving performance at Cursor – including time to first token.</p><p>In this episode of <em>The Pragmatic Engineer</em>, Maude and I dig into the challenges of scaling some of the world's largest software products. We explore how Slack handled growing numbers of enterprise customers, how it evolved its approach to load testing, and the lessons Maude learned during nearly eight years of scaling Slack's infrastructure.</p><p>She also tells us what it was like joining GitHub in 2024 when Copilot was taking off, the challenges of working with GitHub's gigantic Rails monolith, and how Maude uses AI in her work – while keeping judgment calls and decision-making firmly in her own hands.</p><p><strong>Timestamps</strong></p><p>00:00 Intro</p><p>03:15 Early years and path to software engineering</p><p>07:32 First job at Rent the Runway</p><p>09:17 The HipChat data leak</p><p>10:54 Joining Slack and the challenges of scaling</p><p>26:30 Load testing and thundering herds</p><p>32:29 Event floods</p><p>38:30 Evolving load testing at Slack</p><p>48:38 Joining GitHub in 2024</p><p>56:52 The challenges of the Rails monolith</p><p>1:02:26 How Maude uses AI</p><p>1:12:40 Advice for engineers interested in product/platform work</p><p>—</p><p><strong>The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:</strong></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/cursor">Real-world engineering challenges: building Cursor</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/pushing-software-engineering-limits">Pushing software engineering limits with “napkin math”</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/what-is-happening-with-code-reviews">What is happening with code reviews?</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-reliability-is-hard-at-scale">Why reliability is hard at scale: learnings from infrastructure outages</a> </p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/reliability-engineering">What is Reliability Engineering?</a> </p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/migrations">Migrations Done Well</a> </p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/shipping-to-production">Shipping to Production</a> </p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/program-platform-split-uber">The Platform and Program Split at Uber</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/github">The present, past and future of GitHub</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-performant-code-matters-but-gets">Why performant code matters (but gets widely ignored), with Casey Muratori</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/designing-data-intensive-applications">Designing Data-intensive Applications with Martin Kleppmann</a></p><p>—</p><p>Production and marketing by <a target="_blank" href="https://penname.co/"></a><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineers-leading-projects">https://penname.co/</a>. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com.</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at <a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe</a>
Software engineering at Google & CS education with Titus Winters
<p><strong>Brought to You By:</strong></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://turbopuffer.com/pragmatic"><strong>turbopuffer</strong></a><strong> </strong>– a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://linear.app/pragmatic"><strong>Linear</strong></a> – the product development system for teams and agents</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://workos.com/"><strong>WorkOS</strong></a> – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.</p><p>—</p><p>An engineer who helped create today’s software engineering curriculum now says to burn down almost all of it. What’s the cause of this contradiction? We find out from the lead author of <a target="_blank" href="https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/software-engineering-at/9781492082781"><em>Software Engineering at Google</em></a>.</p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/tituswinters/">Titus Winters</a> spent more than a decade at Google, where he led its readability program and built <a target="_blank" href="https://abseil.io/">Abseil</a>, Google’s open-sourced foundational C++ libraries. He is currently a Senior Principal Scientist at Adobe, where he focuses on developer experience and productivity.</p><p>In this episode of <em>The Pragmatic Engineer podcast</em>, Titus and I discuss how his team tackled a massive refactoring project across Google's 250-million-line C++ codebase, why Google made testing mandatory, and his work on updating the ACM/IEEE undergraduate computer science curriculum guidelines.</p><p>We also explore why traditional productivity metrics miss some of AI’s biggest benefits, what needs to change in CS education, and how new engineers can stand out.</p><p><strong>Timestamps</strong></p><p>00:00 Intro</p><p>07:01 Getting hired by Google</p><p>09:48 Finding his niche at Google</p><p>14:32 Why Google made testing mandatory</p><p>17:45 Why new engineers fear making mistakes</p><p>20:40 Abseil: C++ foundations at Google</p><p>23:09 Google’s massive C++ refactoring</p><p>30:48 AI for rewrites</p><p>39:07 Software Engineering at Google: the book</p><p>43:10 Google’s readability reviews</p><p>47:18 Why teams still matter</p><p>52:41 Psychological safety</p><p>58:17 Layoffs and culture</p><p>1:02:11 Measuring developer productivity</p><p>1:11:17 Rethinking CS education</p><p>1:22:56 What new grads should learn</p><p>1:32:08 Titus’s ideal software engineering curriculum</p><p>1:36:27 Advice for breaking into tech</p><p>1:38:35 Book recommendation</p><p>—</p><p><strong>The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:</strong></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-state-of-the-tech-industry-in">The state of the tech industry in 2026</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/google">Inside Google's Engineering Culture</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ideas-slow-down-to-speed-up-when">Slow down to speed up when working with AI agents</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/measuring-developer-productivity">Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-tech-companies-measure-the-impact-of-ai">How tech companies measure the impact of AI on software development</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/what-is-happening-with-code-reviews">What is happening with code reviews?</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/when-ai-writes-almost-all-code-what">When AI writes almost all code, what happens to software engineering?</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/developer-productivity-with-dr-nicole">Developer productivity with Dr. Nicole Forsgren (creator of DORA, co-creator of SPACE)</a> </p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/measuring-the-impact-of-ai-on-software">Measuring the impact of AI on software engineering – with Laura Tacho</a></p><p>—</p><p>Production and marketing by <a target="_blank" href="https://penname.co/"></a><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineers-leading-projects">https://penname.co/</a>. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com.</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at <a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe</a>
The revised rules of engineering management with Will Larson
<p><strong>Brought to You By:</strong></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://turbopuffer.com/pragmatic"><strong>turbopuffer</strong></a><strong> </strong>– a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable.</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="http://entire.io/pragmatic"><strong>Entire</strong></a> – Git hosting, rebuilt for the agentic era. Every agent session, prompt and tool calls: stored in your repo.</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://antithesis.com/pragmatic"><strong>Antithesis</strong></a> – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.</p><p>—</p><p>What’s changed in “the unwritten rules” of engineering management since the 2010s, what drove the shift to today, and what has it done to the engineer-to-CTO career path? Today’s guest is one of the best people I know who can tackle these questions.</p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://lethain.com/">Will Larson</a> is CTO of <a target="_blank" href="https://imprint.co/">Imprint</a>, was an engineering executive for 10+ years, and is the author of several popular books on engineering leadership, including ‘<a target="_blank" href="https://lethain.com/eng-execs-primer/"><em>The Engineering Executive's Primer</em></a>,’ ‘<a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/Staff-Engineer-Leadership-beyond-management/dp/1736417916"><em>Staff Engineer</em></a>, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1732265186"><em>An Elegant Puzzle</em></a>,’ and ‘<a target="_blank" href="https://craftingengstrategy.com/"><em>Crafting Engineering Strategy</em></a><em>.’</em> Previously, he was also CTO at Carta and Calm, and an engineering leader at Stripe and Uber.</p><p>In this episode, we explore how engineering leadership has evolved from management practices shaped in the long post-financial-crisis ZIRP era to the altered expectations of engineers and managers today.</p><p>Is middle management an increasingly precarious career path, and might managers need to reskill and return to hands-on technical work – or even consider retirement? Will makes the case, and we hear why the traditional path to engineering executive roles is changing, as well as why taking one step backward might sometimes be the best way forward.</p><p>We discuss Will's early career, and get his first-hand account of Digg's disastrous relaunch, his own path to CTO, and he tells us why career ladders still matter. We also explore how AI is changing engineering roles and bringing technical decision-making back to leadership.</p><p><strong>Timestamps</strong></p><p>00:00 Intro</p><p>08:20 Stories from Yahoo!</p><p>12:47 Digg’s v4 rewrite: the insider story</p><p>26:02 Will’s path to eng leadership</p><p>30:03 Uber, Stripe, Carta, and Calm</p><p>35:11 What does a CTO do?</p><p>38:09 Will’s role at Imprint</p><p>42:48 How engineering management has evolved</p><p>51:08 ZIRP’s impact on tech</p><p>57:21 Career ladders</p><p>1:01:03 Eng 1 vs Eng 2</p><p>1:06:58 How software engineering roles are changing</p><p>1:16:25 Revised rules of engineering leadership</p><p>1:21:57 The risks of becoming a bureaucrat as an EM</p><p>1:25:57 How to become a CTO?</p><p>1:31:33 Middle management vs. line management</p><p>1:41:36 Will’s writing</p><p>1:52:13 Book recommendations</p><p>—</p><p><strong>The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:</strong></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/zirp">The end of ZIRP and what it means for startups and the tech industry</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/getting-an-engineering-executive">Getting an Engineering Executive Job</a> – an excerpt from Will’s book, The Engineering Executive's Primer</p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/what-is-a-staff-engineer">What is a Staff+ Engineer?</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/stripe">Inside Stripe’s engineering culture</a> </p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineering-career-paths">Engineering career paths at Big Tech and startups</a> </p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/staying-technical">Staying technical as an engineering manager</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/performance-calibrations-part-2">Performance calibrations at tech companies</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/scaling-uber-with-thuan-pham-ubers">Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber’s first CTO)</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/high-growth-startups-uber-and-cloudkitchens">Hypergrowth startups: Uber and CloudKitchens</a></p><p>—</p><p>Production and marketing by <a target="_blank" href="https://penname.co/"></a><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineers-leading-projects">https://penname.co/</a>. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com.</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at <a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe</a>
Uber’s AI infra, from the inside
<p><strong>Brought to You By:</strong></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://turbopuffer.com/pragmatic"><strong>turbopuffer</strong></a><strong> </strong>– a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://linear.app/pragmatic"><strong>Linear</strong></a> – the product development system for teams and agents</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://workos.com/"><strong>WorkOS</strong></a> – everything you need to make your app enterprise-ready.</p><p>—</p><p>What do developer tools look like inside of Uber, today? They are <em>very</em> different from what you would see at most places. For example, can you guess what service a system called DevPods, Code Inbox, Slate or Wisdom would be providing to engineers?</p><p>Today’s episode is a deepdive into the day-to-day tools of devs at Uber, our tour guide being on of Uber’s longest-tenured engineers: <a target="_blank" href="https://x.com/udaykiran?lang=en">Uday Kiran Medisetty</a>. Uday is one of the few Distinguished Engineers at the company, and leads much of the work on agentic AI, today.</p><p>With Uday, we talk through how Uber’s developer infrastructure prepared it for AI agents. We look at the systems Uber built before generative AI and the new tools that connect agents to its code, internal services, and engineering knowledge. Uday explains how engineers use background agents, why tools like Slate make development (and bugfixing!) more efficient, and how code review is changing. We also cover Uber’s approach to token costs and how it measures productivity as the engineer’s role changes.</p><p><strong>Timestamps</strong></p><p>00:00 Intro</p><p>02:48 Uday’s early days at Uber</p><p>05:40 Uber’s move to microservices</p><p>07:55 Uber’s engineering team, then and now</p><p>09:05 Developer tooling before AI</p><p>16:03 DevPods</p><p>19:28 Building for AI agents</p><p>29:27 MCP gateway</p><p>34:37 Agent Skills repo</p><p>38:46 The context graph and Cortana</p><p>47:54 PRD and ERD tool</p><p>50:45 Minion</p><p>54:46 Testing and code review with Bazel, Slate, and Capri</p><p>1:12:26 Edge Gateway, Shepherd, and Wisdom</p><p>1:21:33 The changing role of engineer and measuring productivity</p><p>1:30:40 Uday’s favorite new products</p><p>—</p><p><strong>The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:</strong></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-uber-uses-ai-for-development">How Uber uses AI for development: inside look</a> </p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/scaling-uber-with-thuan-pham-ubers">Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber's first CTO)</a> </p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/uber-move-to-cloud">Inside Uber's move to the Cloud</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/program-platform-split-uber">The Platform and Program Split at Uber</a> </p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/high-growth-startups-uber-and-cloudkitchens">Hypergrowth startups: Uber and CloudKitchens with Charles-Axel Dein</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-uber-built-its-observability-platform">How Uber Built its Observability Platform</a> </p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/uber-eng-productivity">How Uber is Measuring Engineering Productivity</a> </p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/developer-experience-at-uber">Developer Experience at Uber with Gautam Korlam</a></p><p>—</p><p>Production and marketing by <a target="_blank" href="https://penname.co/"></a><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineers-leading-projects">https://penname.co/</a>. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com.</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at <a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe</a>
Building resilient systems with Sam Newman
<p><strong>Brought to You By:</strong></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://turbopuffer.com/pragmatic"><strong>turbopuffer</strong></a><strong> </strong>– a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable.</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="http://entire.io/pragmatic"><strong>Entire</strong></a> – Git hosting, rebuilt for the agentic era. Every agent session, prompt and tool calls: stored in your repo.</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://antithesis.com/pragmatic"><strong>Antithesis</strong></a> – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.</p><p>—</p><p>Sam Newman wrote one of the most-read books about microservices (“<a target="_blank" href="https://samnewman.io/books/building_microservices/">Building Microservices</a>”), but he calls them an architecture of “last resort.”</p><p>In this episode of the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, Sam explains his thinking on this, and he’s certainly well placed to do so; he was in the room when the term “microservices” was coined. We discuss what teams get wrong when adopting microservices, why independent deployment matters, and how microservices can help teams work more autonomously.</p><p>We also delve into his new book, ‘<a target="_blank" href="https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/building-resilient-distributed/9781098163532/"><strong>Building Resilient Distributed Systems</strong></a>’, and Sam explains his three rules for distributed systems, why observability is essential, and also why it’s vital to take business context into account when deciding whether to fail open or fail closed on errors.</p><p>We also explore how AI is changing software development, from specs versus code as a source of truth to cognitive debt and cognitive surrender. Sam shares how modular architecture can help teams experiment with AI while maintaining understanding of the systems being built.</p><p><strong>Timestamps</strong></p><p>00:00 Intro</p><p>03:16 Sam’s path into tech</p><p>09:32 Thoughtworks</p><p>20:55 The rise of microservices</p><p>33:37 Are specs becoming more important than code?</p><p>45:22 Building Resilient Distributed Systems (Sam’s new book)</p><p>52:35 Three rules of distributed systems</p><p>56:16 Observability</p><p>1:02:20 Resilience tradeoffs</p><p>1:07:54 Idempotency</p><p>1:15:58 Thundering herds</p><p>1:21:03 Business context and resilience decisions</p><p>1:25:51 Resilience engineering: four concepts</p><p>1:32:42 AI and resilience</p><p>1:36:26 AI’s limitations and where to use it</p><p>1:40:06 Cognitive debt and cognitive surrender</p><p>1:45:02 Modular architecture and AI software factories</p><p>1:51:53 Resources for learning software architecture</p><p>1:55:30 Where to find Sam</p><p>—</p><p><strong>The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:</strong></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/scaling-uber-with-thuan-pham-ubers">Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber’s first CTO)</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/what-is-good-software-architecture">What is good software architecture at Netflix?</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-past-and-future-of-backend-practices">The past and future of modern backend practices</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/reliability-engineering">What is reliability engineering, and the history of SRE</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/antithesis">How to debug large, distributed systems: Antithesis</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/designing-data-intensive-applications">Designing Data-intensive Applications with Martin Kleppmann</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/bluesky">Building Bluesky: a Distributed Social Network</a></p><p>—</p><p>Production and marketing by <a target="_blank" href="https://penname.co/"></a><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineers-leading-projects">https://penname.co/</a>. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com.</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at <a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe</a>
Distributed databases with Peter Mattis
<p><strong>Brought to You By:</strong></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://turbopuffer.com/pragmatic"><strong>turbopuffer</strong></a><strong> </strong>– a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://linear.app/pragmatic"><strong>Linear</strong></a> – the product development system for teams and agents</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://workos.com/"><strong>WorkOS</strong></a> – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.</p><p>—</p><p>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? <a target="_blank" href="https://x.com/petermattis">Peter Mattis</a> is co-founder and CTO of <a target="_blank" href="https://www.cockroachlabs.com">Cockroach Labs</a>, and an original creator of GIMP. He also worked on Gmail and distributed storage at Google.</p><p>In this episode, Peter reflects on his journey from open source to Google to founding a database company, and we explore how to keep systems fast, reliable, and correct at scale, from Gmail’s early storage challenges to the tradeoffs in building distributed databases.</p><p>Peter tells us how AI has brought him back to writing code after his work shifted toward management, and why he believes AI can improve quality and multiply the impact of domain experts. We also consider the future of code review, and Peter has some advice about how to level up our engineering skills.</p><p><strong>Timestamps</strong></p><p>00:00 Intro</p><p>02:42 Peter’s path into tech</p><p>04:00 Building GIMP</p><p>09:30 Working on Gmail at Google</p><p>14:51 Google’s infra: google3, build files, Bazel, and Colossus</p><p>21:30 Distributed storage bottlenecks</p><p>23:59 Latency, throughput, and availability</p><p>30:04 Contributing to libraries</p><p>41:52 Google Spanner</p><p>46:10 CockroachDB</p><p>52:00 Manual vs. automatic sharding</p><p>55:28 Consistency models and strong consistency</p><p>1:00:03 Raft consensus</p><p>1:06:15 How AI brought Peter back to coding</p><p>1:19:12 Peter’s tools and agentic workflows</p><p>1:23:08 How AI can improve quality</p><p>1:26:39 Code reviews: are they done?</p><p>1:29:17 100x engineers</p><p>1:35:33 Peter’s advice for leveling up your engineering skills</p><p>—</p><p><strong>The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:</strong></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/google">Inside Google’s Engineering Culture</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/resiliency-in-distributed-systems">Resiliency in distributed systems</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/antithesis">How to debug large, distributed systems: Antithesis</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/pushing-software-engineering-limits">Pushing software engineering limits with “napkin math”</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/designing-data-intensive-applications">Designing Data-intensive Applications with Martin Kleppmann</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/formal-methods-with-hillel-wayne">Formal methods with Hillel Wayne</a></p><p>—</p><p>Production and marketing by <a target="_blank" href="https://penname.co/"></a><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineers-leading-projects">https://penname.co/</a>. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com.</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at <a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe</a>
Design Engineering with Maggie Appleton
<p><strong>Brought to You By:</strong></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://turbopuffer.com/pragmatic"><strong>turbopuffer</strong></a> – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable.</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://pages.antithesis.com/oreilly-scaling-ai-ebook-pragmatic?utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=pragmatic_2026&utm_source=pragmatic&utm_content=oreilly_20260923"><strong>O'Reilly Early Release: Scaling AI Adoption in Engineering</strong></a> – a free book on how to adopt and scale AI in a pragmatic way inside of engineering orgs. Complimentary, thanks to Antithesis.</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://entire.io/pragmatic"><strong>Entire</strong></a> – every agent prompt, tool call, stored in your repo, and mirrored.</p><p>—</p><p>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, <a target="_blank" href="https://maggieappleton.com">Maggie Appleton</a>, came onto the Pragmatic Engineer Podcast. She’s a staff research engineer at <a target="_blank" href="https://githubnext.com">GitHub Next</a>, where she builds prototypes to explore how software engineers might collaborate with AI in new ways. Maggie is at the intersection of design, anthropology, and web development, and was the first designer hired by AI startup Elicit, and Lead Design engineer at AI startup, Normally.</p><p>Today’s episode is more visual than usual because Maggie brought her notebook along, so there are peeks inside its pages of prototypes and more:</p><p>We got into designers’ work and how their design processes are adapting to and changing with AI. We explore why Maggie starts projects with pens and notebooks, what distinguishes design engineers from other designers, and why understanding engineering constraints leads to better collaboration with engineers. </p><p>We also discuss how Maggie uses jigs to gain more control over AI agents, why human judgment and style still matter when models can generate designs, and how inconsistent AI capabilities can mislead us.</p><p><strong>Timestamps</strong></p><p>00:00 Intro</p><p>03:24 From anthropology to tech</p><p>10:18 What does a designer do?</p><p>18:23 How Maggie works</p><p>24:55 The case for planning with physical tools</p><p>31:53 Why Maggie is learning woodworking</p><p>33:13 Design engineers and engineering constraints</p><p>38:49 How Maggie uses Figma</p><p>40:30 Design at GitHub Next</p><p>45:12 How has AI changed design</p><p>50:37 When models design and why humans are still needed</p><p>53:30 UX and UI</p><p>58:29 Capability gaslighting</p><p>1:00:33 One Developer, Two Dozen Agents, Zero Alignment</p><p>1:07:21 Craft and AI tells</p><p>1:14:17 Visual gardens, home-cooked software, and barefoot developers</p><p>1:21:02 Advice for engineers and lessons from anthropology</p><p>1:25:34 Book recommendation</p><p>—</p><p><strong>The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:</strong></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/what-is-loop-engineering">What is “loop engineering?”</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/design-first-software-engineering">Design-first software engineering: Craft, with Balint Orosz</a><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/design-first-software-engineering"><strong> </strong></a></p><p><strong>•</strong> <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/are-ai-agents-actually-slowing-us">Are AI agents actually slowing us down?</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/vibe-coding-as-a-software-engineer">Vibe Coding as a software engineer</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-codex-is-built">How Codex is built</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-claude-code-is-built">How Claude Code is built</a> </p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/from-chrome-devtools-to-ai-engineering">From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmani</a></p><p>—</p><p>Production and marketing by <a target="_blank" href="https://penname.co/"></a><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineers-leading-projects">https://penname.co/</a>. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com.</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at <a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe</a>
AI Skills with Matt Pocock
<p><strong>Brought to You By:</strong></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://turbopuffer.com/pragmatic"><strong>turbopuffer</strong></a><strong> </strong>– a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://linear.app/pragmatic"><strong>Linear</strong></a> – the product development system for teams and agents</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://workos.com/"><strong>WorkOS</strong></a> – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.</p><p>—</p><p>Why is the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.aihero.dev/skills-grill-me">“grill-me” skill</a> so popular, and why does its creator swear by the importance of software fundamentals? <a target="_blank" href="https://www.mattpocock.com">Matt Pocock</a> created this widely-used skill – and many others – alongside being an educator, content creator, and engineer. His latest course is <a target="_blank" href="https://www.aihero.dev/">AI Hero</a>, and he previously created the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.totaltypescript.com">Total TypeScript</a> course that generated more than $2.5 million in sales.</p><p>In this episode, Matt and I discuss his unconventional path from working as a voice teacher to becoming a developer and going all-in on technical education. He reveals how communication skills helped him break into tech, why he took an unusual three-days-a-week contract at Vercel, and how he built Total TypeScript through workshops, courses, and a lot of free content.</p><p>We also explore “strategic coding,” and how he uses skills like “grill me” and “wayfinder” to plan, delegate, and course-correct with AI agents. Matt explains his “day shift” and “night shift” approach, why splitting context up can keep agents in their “smart zone,” and how concepts from classic software engineering books can guide agents to do better. In this episode, there’s also local versus cloud workflows, whether agents need TDD, how AI is changing the ways that engineers learn the fundamentals, and why humans are still essential in teaching.</p><p><strong>Timestamps</strong></p><p>00:00 Intro</p><p>05:48 How Matt got into tech</p><p>10:14 How Matt got into open source</p><p>12:58 Joining Vercel</p><p>18:39 Total TypeScript</p><p>23:21 AI’s impact on technical education</p><p>30:32 Building reusable skills for AI coding agents</p><p>40:46 The “smart zone” vs the “dumb zone”</p><p>45:02 The wayfinder skill</p><p>47:52 Why agents excel at software engineering</p><p>50:54 “Leading words”</p><p>1:01:10 Learning the fundamentals</p><p>1:09:17 Local vs. cloud agents</p><p>1:12:36 Planning vs. course-correcting</p><p>1:18:13 TDD and agents</p><p>1:23:06 Living in the UK</p><p>1:24:21 Teaching: the human part</p><p>1:28:36 Advice for junior engineers</p><p>1:31:07 Gardeners and great engineers</p><p>1:34:01 Book recommendation</p><p>—</p><p><strong>The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:</strong></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/what-is-loop-engineering">What is "loop engineering?"</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-philosophy-of-software-design">The Philosophy of Software Design – with John Ousterhout</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/context-engineering-with-dex-horthy">Context engineering with Dex Horthy</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/are-ai-agents-actually-slowing-us">Are AI agents actually slowing us down?</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-ai-engineering-stack">The AI Engineering Stack</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-codex-is-built">How Codex is built</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-claude-code-is-built">How Claude Code is built</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-uber-uses-ai-for-development">How Uber uses AI for development: inside look</a></p><p>—</p><p>Production and marketing by <a target="_blank" href="https://penname.co/"></a><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineers-leading-projects">https://penname.co/</a>. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com.</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at <a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe</a>
Building Codex with Tibo Sottiaux
<p><strong>Brought to You By:</strong></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://turbopuffer.com/pragmatic"><strong>turbopuffer</strong></a><strong> </strong>– a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://antithesis.com/pragmatic"><strong>Antithesis</strong></a> – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="http://entire.io/pragmatic"><strong>Entire</strong></a> – Git hosting, rebuilt for the agentic era. Every agent session, prompt and tool calls: stored in your repo.</p><p>—</p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/thibault-sottiaux-27195366">Tibo Sottiaux</a> 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 frequent – and generous – usage reset announcements, like this one <a target="_blank" href="https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2097174560412246215?s=20">yesterday</a>.</p><p>In this episode of the Pragmatic Engineer Podcast, Tibo and I discuss how Codex was built and continues to be iterated upon. We explore why the Codex CLI is written in Rust and was released as open source, how the harness and models have evolved, and why Codex supports models from multiple providers.</p><p>Tibo also shares details about how the OpenAI team uses Codex throughout the software development lifecycle, including code reviews, maintenance, and system rearchitecture. We look into how AI is lowering the cost of changing code – and some interesting side effects of this – the merger of ChatGPT and Codex, and also how Tibo uses the tools in his own work.</p><p>—</p><p><strong>Timestamps</strong></p><p>00:00 Intro</p><p>07:21 Working at Google</p><p>12:41 What drew Tibo to OpenAI</p><p>15:19 The early days of Codex</p><p>18:20 Why Codex was built in Rust</p><p>21:15 Why Codex is open source</p><p>25:50 Codex plays nice with other models: why?</p><p>32:09 How the harness works</p><p>36:44 Harness and model improvements</p><p>41:19 The SDLC behind Codex</p><p>46:39 Code reviews at Codex</p><p>52:09 Maintenance and architecture</p><p>56:43 How AI tools expand what engineers can do</p><p>1:02:30 The Merge: ChatGPT + Codex</p><p>1:07:16 How Tibo uses Codex and ChatGPT</p><p>1:10:44 Advice for engineers who want to work in AI</p><p>—</p><p><strong>The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:</strong></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-codex-is-built">How Codex is built</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-claude-code-is-built">How Claude Code is built</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/cursor">How Cursor was built</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/what-is-loop-engineering">What is "loop engineering?”</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-uber-uses-ai-for-development">How Uber uses AI for development: inside look</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-ramp-built-inspect">Why Ramp built its own in-house coding agent, Inspect</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-creator-of-clawd-i-ship-code">“I ship code I don’t read”:</a> with Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw</p><p>—</p><p>Production and marketing by <a target="_blank" href="https://penname.co/"></a><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineers-leading-projects">https://penname.co/</a>. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com.</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at <a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe</a>
Why performant code matters (but gets widely ignored), with Casey Muratori
<p><strong>Brought to You By:</strong></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://antithesis.com/pragmatic"><strong>Antithesis</strong></a> – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.</p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://sentry.io/pragmatic"><strong>Sentry</strong></a> – application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers.</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://turbopuffer.com/pragmatic"><strong>turbopuffer</strong></a><strong> </strong>– a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable.</p><p>—</p><p>There can be few people around who care about software performance more than today’s pod guest, <a target="_blank" href="https://x.com/cmuratori">Casey Muratori</a>. He’s a programmer and videogame developer, founder of <a target="_blank" href="https://mollyrocket.com">Molly Rocket</a>, and creator of <a target="_blank" href="https://hero.handmade.network/">Handmade Hero</a> – a long-running series about building a game from scratch. He also evangelizes about <a target="_blank" href="https://www.computerenhance.com/p/welcome-to-the-performance-aware">performance</a> on his Substack, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.computerenhance.com/">Computer, Enhance</a>.</p><p>We got to know each other about three years ago, first via messages, including this one from Casey:</p><p>“Why does the industry zeitgeist place so little emphasis on software performance when there seems to be overwhelming evidence that performance is critical to their bottom line?</p><p>Like you, I run a Substack for professional programmers, but I focus exclusively on software performance. Although we are quite large by Substack standards, so a certain subset of programmers must believe performance is important, I nonetheless hear lots of dismissive excuses when I post on social media. This happens so frequently, I devoted an entire article to cataloging the extensive pro-performance evidence we already have from the world's leading software companies: <a target="_blank" href="https://www.computerenhance.com/p/performance-excuses-debunked">Performance Excuses Debunked</a>.</p><p><strong>Strangely, nobody has a rebuttal to why performance is important</strong>. When I point people to this, they actually tend to agree. But the prevailing attitude nonetheless stays the same.”</p><p>I’m delighted we finally have Casey on the podcast because it’s overdue! In this episode, we discuss why software performance matters, why it’s overlooked, and how developers can get better at writing performant code. We explore why performance should be considered during design, the value of learning to read assembly & understanding how CPUs work, Casey’s critique of ‘clean code’, and why he believes testing shouldn't drive software design.</p><p>We touch on how videogame development has changed, and influential game engines. Casey also tells us why he prefers to write code by hand, not with AI, and more.</p><p>—</p><p><strong>Timestamps</strong></p><p>00:00 Intro</p><p>05:17 Games at Microsoft</p><p>12:52 Building games</p><p>16:00 Why performance matters</p><p>27:12 Why you should learn to read assembly</p><p>30:36 Designing for optimization</p><p>42:51 How to get better at writing performant software</p><p>49:04 Understanding how the CPU works</p><p>55:53 Building games then and now</p><p>1:05:56 How game engines changed building games</p><p>1:10:48 Why new games compete with old games</p><p>1:13:25 GTA 6: why is it taking so long?</p><p>1:16:59 Casey’s critique of clean code</p><p>1:21:48 Casey’s take on TDD</p><p>1:24:30 What is good code?</p><p>1:27:32 What makes a good software engineer?</p><p>1:33:56 Why Casey doesn’t code with AI</p><p>1:39:01 AI’s impact on the game industry</p><p>1:44:43 AI and burnout</p><p>1:50:21 Why you should read papers</p><p>—</p><p><strong>The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:</strong></p><p>•<a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/pushing-software-engineering-limits">Pushing software engineering limits with “napkin math”</a><strong> </strong>with<strong> </strong>Simon Eskildsen </p><p>•<a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-games-typically-get-built">How Games Typically Get Built</a>: prototyping, game engines, and a different type of QA</p><p>•<a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/game-development-basics">Game Development Basics</a>: deepdive on how game studios differ from standard software teams</p><p>•<a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/linear">Inside Linear's Engineering Culture</a>: building a performant product with a tiny team</p><p>•<a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/thronefall">Building a best-selling game with a tiny team</a> – with Jonas Tyroller. A two-person team built a game that sold 1M+ copies</p><p><strong>More on premature optimization:</strong> read or watch Casey’s extended take on “premature optimization is the root of all evil”: <a target="_blank" href="https://www.computerenhance.com/p/theroot">https://www.computerenhance.com/p/theroot</a></p><p>—</p><p>Production and marketing by <a target="_blank" href="https://penname.co/"></a><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineers-leading-projects">https://penname.co/</a>. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com.</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at <a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe</a>
From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmani
<p><strong>Brought to You By:</strong></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://antithesis.com/pragmatic"><strong>Antithesis</strong></a> – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.</p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://cloud.google.com/run?e=48754805&utm_source=&utm_medium=&utm_campaign=the_pragmatic_engineer"><strong>Google Cloud Run</strong></a> – run your code and host LLMs directly on top of Google’s scalable infrastructure, without having to worry about managing infra.</p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://sentry.io/pragmatic"><strong>Sentry</strong></a> – application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers</p><p>—</p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://addyosmani.com">Addy Osmani</a> spent more than 14 years at Google, working on Chrome, DevTools, Core Web Vitals, and most recently, AI developer experience.</p><p>If you've ever opened Chrome DevTools, or optimized a page for Core Web Vitals, you’ve used software built by Addy Osmani. In this episode, I sit down with Addy and we talk about his path from building a web browser aged just 16 to becoming a director at Google. We discuss what he learned from building tools for millions of developers, Google’s engineering culture, and why he continued doing hands-on coding work as a manager. We also get into how he works with AI agents today, the risks of ‘cognitive surrender,’ his approach to ‘loop engineering,’ and why it’s good to develop skills in product management, go-to-market, and other areas.</p><p>—</p><p><strong>Timestamps</strong></p><p>00:00 Intro</p><p>02:50 Addy’s current workflow</p><p>05:11 Addy’s path into tech</p><p>15:04 Addy’s work on jQuery</p><p>16:44 TodoMVC</p><p>21:44 Getting hired at Google and working on Chrome</p><p>27:17 Building dev tools</p><p>40:15 Core Web Vitals</p><p>45:42 Google’s engineering culture</p><p>51:03 Addy’s career trajectory at Google</p><p>57:55 The director role at Google</p><p>1:01:40 Cognitive debt and cognitive surrender</p><p>1:03:03 Working with agents</p><p>1:05:52 Loop engineering</p><p>1:12:55 The changing role of the software engineer</p><p>1:18:15 How Addy uses AI in writing</p><p>1:27:40 What’s next for Addy</p><p>1:28:47 Career advice</p><p>—</p><p><strong>The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:</strong></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/what-is-loop-engineering">What is loop engineering?</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/google">Inside Google’s engineering culture</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-ai-will-change-software-engineering">How AI-assisted coding will change software engineering: hard truths</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/are-ai-agents-actually-slowing-us">Are AI agents actually slowing us down?</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-claude-code-is-built">How Claude Code is built</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-codex-is-built">How Codex is built</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/from-ides-to-ai-agents-with-steve?">From IDEs to AI Agents</a> with Steve Yegge</p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/googles-engineering-culture?utm_source=chatgpt.com">Google’s engineering culture</a>: the podcast</p><p>—</p><p>Production and marketing by <a target="_blank" href="https://penname.co/"></a><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineers-leading-projects">https://penname.co/</a>. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com.</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at <a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe</a>
Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majors
<p><strong>Brought to You By:</strong></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://antithesis.com/pragmatic"><strong>Antithesis</strong></a> – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://workos.com/"><strong>WorkOS</strong></a> – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.</p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="http://buildkite.com/pragmatic"><strong>Buildkite</strong></a><strong> – </strong>CI software built to absorb whatever your coding agents throw at the build queue</p><p>—</p><p>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 of Honeycomb, co-author of <a target="_blank" href="https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/observability-engineering-2nd/9781098179915/">Observability Engineering</a>. (Note: the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/observability-engineering-2nd/9781098179915/">second edition of Observability Engineering</a> is out, and it’s pretty much a full rewrite of the book, I recommend grabbing it if you’re building reliable systems)</p><p>In this episode, I sat down with Charity to discuss how her thinking on AI has evolved, why she believes it is becoming a foundational part of software engineering, and what that means for how teams build, review, and ship software.</p><p>We explore how AI is changing the economics of code generation, why reliability and verification are increasingly the bottlenecks, and why the rise of non-deterministic systems requires more engineering discipline. Charity shares her views on code reviews, observability, DevOps, leadership, and why both AI skeptics and enthusiasts are getting important things right.</p><p>—</p><p><strong>Timestamps</strong></p><p>00:00 Intro</p><p>02:56 How Parse led to Honeycomb</p><p>06:00 The limits of individual productivity metrics</p><p>09:08 How Charity’s perspective on AI has evolved</p><p>13:50 Rewriting code vs. editing code</p><p>19:20 Production as a stage of development</p><p>22:14 Code reviews</p><p>26:56 Non-deterministic systems</p><p>31:11 Sensible uses of AI</p><p>37:41 The two AI camps</p><p>44:40 Why AI works so well for building software</p><p>49:42 DevOps</p><p>55:13 Modern observability</p><p>1:00:40 Handling context overload</p><p>1:01:56 What’s new in Observability Engineering’s 2nd edition</p><p>1:07:45 What effective leadership looks like</p><p>1:10:25 Engineering management: what is changing?</p><p>1:16:31 Junior engineers</p><p>1:18:01 AI fatigue</p><p>1:21:39 Book recommendations</p><p>—</p><p><strong>The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:</strong></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/shipping-to-production">Shipping to production</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/measuring-ai-dev-tools">Deepdive: How 10 tech companies choose the next generation of dev tools</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-is-meta-destroying-its-engineering">Why is Meta destroying its engineering organization?</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/when-ai-writes-almost-all-code-what">When AI writes almost all code, what happens to software engineering?</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/are-ai-agents-actually-slowing-us">Are AI agents actually slowing us down?</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/observability-the-present-and-future">Observability: the present and future</a>, with Charity Majors</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-third-golden-age-of-software">The third golden age of software engineering – thanks to AI</a>, with Grady Booch</p><p>—</p><p>Production and marketing by <a target="_blank" href="https://penname.co/"></a><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineers-leading-projects">https://penname.co/</a>. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com.</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at <a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe</a>
Formal methods with Hillel Wayne
<p><strong>Brought to You By:</strong></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://antithesis.com/pragmatic"><strong>Antithesis</strong></a> – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://turbopuffer.com/pragmatic"><strong>turbopuffer</strong></a><strong> </strong>– a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable.</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://workos.com/"><strong>WorkOS</strong></a> – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.</p><p>—</p><p>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 tackle the prediction. Hillel Wayne is a formal methods consultant, educator, and author, who’s deeply interested in software history. </p><p>In this episode of Pragmatic Engineer podcast, I sit down with Hillel to compare software engineering with traditional engineering, discuss where formal methods fit into modern software development, and we explore why they are essential for some of the world's most complex systems. We cover the formal specification language, TLA+, walk through several formal verification tools, examine why distributed systems are so difficult to reason about, and look into whether AI will make formal methods accessible to more engineering teams.</p><p>—</p><p><strong>Timestamps</strong></p><p>00:00 Intro</p><p>03:21 The Crossover Project</p><p>10:26 What software engineering does better</p><p>14:19 What traditional engineering does better</p><p>17:06 Formal methods</p><p>28:21 TLA+: what it is and demo</p><p>35:47 TLA+ at Amazon</p><p>36:59 Ways distributed systems break</p><p>39:52 Formal methods and systems thinking</p><p>45:09 The value of learning math</p><p>49:12 What TLA+ is good for and isn’t</p><p>51:39 Alloy: a declarative language for software modeling</p><p>57:42 Other formal methods tools</p><p>1:00:13 Property-based testing</p><p>1:04:20 AI and the need for formal verification</p><p>1:11:18 Logic for programmers</p><p>1:13:24 Hillel’s 2025 prediction on AI’s impact</p><p>1:20:19 Book recommendation</p><p>—</p><p><strong>The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:</strong></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/antithesis">How to debug large, distributed systems: Antithesis</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-aws-s3-is-built">How AWS S3 is built</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/paying-down-tech-debt">Paying down tech debt</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-big-tech-does-qa">How Big Tech does quality assurance (QA)</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/bug-management-that-works-part-1">Bug management that works</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/resiliency-in-distributed-systems">Resiliency in distributed systems</a></p><p>—</p><p>Production and marketing by <a target="_blank" href="https://penname.co/"></a><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineers-leading-projects">https://penname.co/</a>. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com.</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at <a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe</a>
Context engineering with Dex Horthy
<p><strong>Brought to You By:</strong></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://antithesis.com/pragmatic"><strong>Antithesis</strong></a><strong> –</strong> verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.</p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="http://buildkite.com/pragmatic"><strong>Buildkite</strong></a><strong> – </strong>CI software built to absorb whatever your coding agents throw at the build queue.</p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://sentry.io/pragmatic"><strong>Sentry</strong></a><strong> – </strong>application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers.</p><p>—</p><p>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.</p><p>In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer podcast, I sit down with the CEO and cofounder of HumanLayer, Dex Horthy, who coined the term “context engineering”. We discuss the ideas behind this context engineering, harness engineering, loop engineering, software factories, why his approach to AI-assisted software development has evolved, and how <a target="_blank" href="https://www.humanlayer.dev/">HumanLayer</a> is helping engineering teams automate more of the software development lifecycle without sacrificing code quality.</p><p>—</p><p><strong>Timestamps</strong></p><p>00:00 Intro </p><p>01:33 Dex’s path into tech</p><p>03:34 Early work in platform engineering</p><p>05:28 Replicated</p><p>11:24 Metalytics</p><p>12:36 12-factor agents</p><p>18:27 Context engineering</p><p>23:38 Harness engineering</p><p>26:11 Context overload</p><p>30:45 Loop engineering</p><p>44:34 Software factories before and after AI</p><p>50:33 Automation limits</p><p>55:18 Three options for automating</p><p>59:00 RPI framework</p><p>1:04:16 Intentional compaction</p><p>1:11:48 Token harder vs. token smarter</p><p>1:16:44 AI slop</p><p>1:19:15 HumanLayer</p><p>1:29:09 Book recommendation</p><p>—</p><p><strong>The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:</strong></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-uber-uses-ai-for-development">How Uber uses AI for development: inside look</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/are-ai-agents-actually-slowing-us">Are AI agents actually slowing us down?</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-tooling-2026">AI Tooling for Software Engineers in 2026</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/vibe-coding-as-a-software-engineer">Vibe Coding as a software engineer</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-claude-code-is-built">How Claude Code is built</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-engineering-in-the-real-world">AI Engineering in the real world</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-ai-engineering-stack">The AI Engineering Stack</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-ai-will-change-software-engineering">How AI-assisted coding will change software engineering: hard truths</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-creator-of-clawd-i-ship-code">The creator of OpenClaw: "I ship code I don't read"</a></p><p>—</p><p>Production and marketing by <a target="_blank" href="https://penname.co/"></a><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineers-leading-projects">https://penname.co/</a>. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com.</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at <a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe</a>
The Pragmatic Engineer AMA
<p><strong>Brought to You By:</strong></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://antithesis.com/pragmatic"><strong>Antithesis</strong></a> – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.</p><p>—</p><p>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 <a target="_blank" href="https://wordsmith.ai/">Wordsmith AI</a>, a legal tech startup <em>(note: I’m </em><a target="_blank" href="https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/investing/"><em>an investor</em></a><em>)</em>.</p><p>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 software engineering is headed, and I offer advice on some specific situations. <em>Thanks to everyone who sent questions!</em></p><p>—</p><p><strong>Timestamps</strong></p><p>00:00 Intro</p><p>01:56 From Uber to writing</p><p>09:22 AI-native SDLC</p><p>14:00 AI and hiring</p><p>19:06 Engineers currently thriving</p><p>22:18 Junior roles</p><p>24:44 Meta’s war mode</p><p>27:54 AI at Big Tech vs. startups</p><p>36:46 Tech debt</p><p>41:36 Types of engineering managers</p><p>44:40 Measuring AI productivity</p><p>48:30 The value of CS degrees</p><p>50:53 AI at Pragmatic Engineer</p><p>56:09 Future-proofing your career</p><p>1:01:36 The EU job market</p><p>1:03:55 Making money as a creator</p><p>1:08:20 What’s next for The Pragmatic Engineer</p><p>1:09:27 Bunq and Pollen</p><p>1:13:38 Spotting trends</p><p>1:14:33 Book updates</p><p>1:15:20 Favorite books & tech products</p><p>1:17:13 What won’t change in engineering</p><p>—</p><p><strong>The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:</strong></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/state-of-the-job-market-2026">State of the software engineering job market in 2026</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-impact-of-ai-on-software-engineers-2026">The impact of AI on software engineers in 2026: key trends.</a> </p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/measuring-ai-dev-tools">How 10 tech companies choose the next generation of dev tools</a> </p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-reality-of-tech-interviews">The reality of tech interviews</a></p><p>—</p><p>Production and marketing by <a target="_blank" href="https://penname.co/"></a><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineers-leading-projects">https://penname.co/</a>. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com.</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at <a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe</a>
How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industry
<p><strong>Brought to You By:</strong></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://antithesis.com/pragmatic"><strong>Antithesis</strong></a> – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://turbopuffer.com/pragmatic"><strong>turbopuffer</strong></a><strong> </strong>– a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable.</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://workos.com/"><strong>WorkOS</strong></a> – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.</p><p>—</p><p>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 Manifesto’. But these days, he's re-examining many ideas for the age of AI, and says we’re failing to accumulate trust during this new era at the same high rate as new code is being accumulated.</p><p>In this episode of the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, Kent and I dig into his journey from discovering Smalltalk in the early days of personal computing, to helping define modern software engineering practices. We explore the origins of TDD, design patterns, Extreme Programming, and Agile – along with some lessons learned at Apple and Facebook.</p><p>Kent explains why he believes software engineering is about <em>far more</em> than writing code, why no one yet knows exactly how engineers should work alongside AI agents, and how his "explore, expand, extract" framework can help engineers navigate major technology shifts.</p><p>—</p><p><strong>Timestamps</strong></p><p>00:00 Intro</p><p>03:47 Human engineers aren’t going away</p><p>08:00 Kent's path into tech</p><p>13:50 Undergraduate and graduate studies</p><p>17:21 Kent’s first programming job</p><p>18:54 The rise and fall of Smalltalk</p><p>27:04 Working with Ward Cunningham</p><p>37:36 Design patterns</p><p>44:05 Working at Apple</p><p>51:08 CRC Cards</p><p>59:29 Testing tools in the language</p><p>1:04:22 The C3 project with Martin Fowler</p><p>1:09:54 Extreme Programming</p><p>1:16:25 Developing TDD</p><p>1:25:07 Writing the Agile Manifesto</p><p>1:30:00 Agile’s impact</p><p>1:32:40 Agile’s downside</p><p>1:37:32 The Dotcom Bust</p><p>1:44:30 Lessons from working at Facebook</p><p>1:59:44 Kent’s ‘Good to Great’ program at Facebook</p><p>2:06:07 Soft skills engineers need to learn</p><p>2:09:30 AI and the challenges of acceleration</p><p>2:15:53 Explore, expand, extract</p><p>2:22:33 What Kent is excited about</p><p>—</p><p><strong>The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:</strong></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/measuring-developer-productivity">Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey</a> – co-written with Kent Beck</p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/tdd-ai-agents-and-coding-with-kent">TDD, AI agents and coding with Kent Beck</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/paying-down-tech-debt">Paying down tech debt</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-past-and-future-of-backend-practices">The past and future of modern backend practices</a></p><p>—</p><p>Production and marketing by <a target="_blank" href="https://penname.co/"></a><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineers-leading-projects">https://penname.co/</a>. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com.</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at <a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe</a>
Tech interviews with NeetCode
<p><strong>Brought to You By:</strong></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://antithesis.com/pragmatic"><strong>Antithesis</strong></a> – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.</p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://sentry.io/pragmatic"><strong>Sentry</strong></a> – application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers</p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://cloud.google.com/run?e=48754805&utm_source=&utm_medium=&utm_campaign=the_pragmatic_engineer"><strong>Google Cloud Run</strong></a> – run your code and host LLMs directly on top of Google’s scalable infrastructure, without having to worry about managing infra.</p><p>—</p><p>Navdeep Singh – oftentimes better known as NeetCode – is the creator of <a target="_blank" href="http://NeetCode.io">NeetCode.io</a>, one of the most popular coding interview preparation platforms and YouTube channels for software engineers. Before building NeetCode full-time, he worked as a software engineer at Amazon and Google.</p><p>In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I sit down with Neet to discuss his path from Amazon and Google to building his own startup, why he left Amazon after just two months, what he learned at Google, and the decision to leave a stable engineering career to bet on himself. We also discuss what coding interview preparation teaches beyond passing interviews, the value of going deep on difficult problems, and why systems thinking and domain expertise remain essential engineering skills in the age of AI.</p><p>Throughout the conversation, NeetCode makes the case that learning hard things is one of the <em>single best </em>investments an engineer can make, helping build the judgment and expertise that remain valuable no matter how the tools change.</p><p>—</p><p><strong>Timestamps</strong></p><p>00:00 Intro</p><p>02:57 Neet’s take on coding interviews</p><p>06:41 Getting into tech</p><p>08:56 Why Neet isn't a fan of the CAP theorem</p><p>13:12 Quitting Amazon after two months</p><p>18:22 Google vs Amazon</p><p>22:26 The origins of NeetCode</p><p>25:27 Leaving Google to go all in on NeetCode</p><p>32:02 Why Neet doesn't fix every bug</p><p>39:26 The value of coding interview prep</p><p>42:57 Systems thinking and domain expertise</p><p>47:28 Hiring at Big Tech</p><p>52:15 Tech stack at Neetcode</p><p>57:57 The NeetCode redesign contest</p><p>1:01:46 The future of software engineers</p><p>1:09:04 Hot takes: AGI, AI skill erosion, personality traits</p><p>1:22:49 “Maybe some people should just give up”</p><p>1:24:39 How to be a standout engineer</p><p>1:27:55 Book recommendation</p><p>—</p><p><strong>The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:</strong></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/learnings-from-conducting-1000-interviews">Learnings from conducting ~1,000 interviews at Amazon</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-to-get-unstuck-during-coding-interviews">How experienced engineers get unstuck in coding interviews</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-reality-of-tech-interviews">The Reality of Tech Interviews in 2025</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/tech-hiring-inflection-point">Tech hiring: is this an inflection point?</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-fakers">AI fakers exposed in tech dev recruitment: postmortem</a></p><p>—</p><p>Production and marketing by <a target="_blank" href="https://penname.co/"></a><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineers-leading-projects">https://penname.co/</a>. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com.</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at <a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe</a>
CI/CD with Robert Erez
<p><strong>Brought to You By:</strong></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://antithesis.com/pragmatic"><strong>Antithesis</strong></a> – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://workos.com/"><strong>WorkOS</strong></a> – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://turbopuffer.com/pragmatic"><strong>turbopuffer</strong></a> – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable.</p><p>—</p><p>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.</p><p>In this episode of<em> The</em> <em>Pragmatic Engineer</em>, I sit down with Rob to discuss how teams deploy software safely and efficiently at scale. We cover Kubernetes, GitOps, platform engineering, progressive delivery, feature flags, cloud development environments, and the growing role of AI in CI/CD workflows. We also get into the tradeoffs in different deployment approaches, why self-hosted software still matters for some organizations, and the recent evolution of software delivery practices.</p><p>—</p><p><strong>Timestamps</strong></p><p>00:00 Intro</p><p>02:09 Canary deployments at Skype</p><p>05:01 Joining at Octopus Deploy</p><p>06:15 Continuous deployment</p><p>10:26 Why Kubernetes won</p><p>15:51 Kubernetes on-prem</p><p>18:50 How GitOps works</p><p>25:00 The uses and limitations of GitOps</p><p>31:04 The rise of platform teams</p><p>35:51 How AI is changing CI/CD</p><p>39:49 Progressive delivery explained</p><p>47:31 Rollbacks and roll-forwards</p><p>50:14 Feature flags</p><p>54:32 How development environments are evolving</p><p>57:40 Cloud development environments (CDEs)</p><p>1:03:45 Self-hosting CI/CD</p><p>1:09:25 Getting started with progressive delivery</p><p>1:11:15 Book recommendations</p><p>—</p><p><strong>The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:</strong></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/kubernetes-and-retiring-at-the-top">Kubernetes and retiring at the top</a> with Kelsey Hightower</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-past-and-future-of-backend-practices">The past and future of modern backend practices</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/microsoft-ai-dev-tools">Microsoft is dogfooding AI dev tools’ future</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-kubernetes-is-built-with-kat">How Kubernetes is built</a> with Kat Cosgrove</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-linux-is-built-with-greg-kroah">How Linux is built</a><strong> </strong>with Greg KH</p><p>—</p><p>Production and marketing by <a target="_blank" href="https://penname.co/"></a><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineers-leading-projects">https://penname.co/</a>. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com.</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at <a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe</a>
Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightower
<p><strong>Brought to You By:</strong></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://antithesis.com/pragmatic"><strong>Antithesis</strong></a><strong> –</strong> verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.</p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="http://buildkite.com/pragmatic"><strong>Buildkite</strong></a><strong> – </strong>CI software built to absorb whatever your coding agents throw at the build queue</p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://sentry.io/pragmatic"><strong>Sentry</strong></a><strong> – </strong>application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers</p><p>—</p><p>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 most influential voices in modern infrastructure, through his talks, open source work, and writing.</p><p>In this episode of The <em>Pragmatic Engineer podcast</em>, Kelsey and I cover his unconventional path into tech and the lessons he’s learned during three decades in the industry. We discuss his entrepreneurial years, building a reputation through open source, the rise of containers and Kubernetes, and his time at Google during one of the most consequential periods in cloud computing. </p><p>He recounts how a job offer from a big tech giant led to the biggest raise of his career, what prompted him to slow down after years of career acceleration, and we also discuss his perspective on AI. Throughout, Kelsey keeps a simple idea front of mind: that technology is ultimately about people. Whether it’s infrastructure, leadership, careers, or AI, he argues that the goal is not to build technology for its own sake; it’s to solve meaningful human problems.</p><p>—</p><p><strong>Timestamps</strong></p><p>00:00 Intro</p><p>03:34 Kelsey’s first job at McDonald’s</p><p>05:04 His non-traditional path into tech</p><p>11:45 Landing his first tech job with an A+ certification</p><p>15:33 His entrepreneurial years</p><p>19:45 Joining Google as a data center technician</p><p>27:48 Learning automation at a Rackspace spinoff</p><p>33:26 Moving into financial services</p><p>50:00 Building a reputation through open source</p><p>53:55 From configuration management to containers</p><p>1:08:20 The rise of Kubernetes</p><p>1:25:05 Why he almost joined NASA instead of Google</p><p>1:29:20 Defining DevRel at Google</p><p>1:38:20 Demonstrating impact at Google</p><p>1:41:20 Microsoft's offer</p><p>1:55:20 Learning how to slow down</p><p>2:06:39 Advising and investing</p><p>2:15:03 A people-first view of GenAI</p><p>2:24:27 Using AI with guardrails</p><p>2:28:26 Matching AI to the task</p><p>2:36:06 Staying relevant in the AI era</p><p>—</p><p><strong>The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:</strong></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/career-paths-for-software-engineers">Career paths for software engineers at large tech companies</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-past-and-future-of-backend-practices">The past and future of modern backend practices</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-kubernetes-is-built-with-kat">How Kubernetes is built</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-linux-is-built-with-greg-kroah">How Linux is built</a></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-staff-engineers-path">The Staff Engineer’s Path: You’re a role model now (sorry!)</a></p><p>—</p><p>Production and marketing by <a target="_blank" href="https://penname.co/"></a><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineers-leading-projects">https://penname.co/</a>. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com.</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at <a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe</a>
Building OpenCode with Dax Raad
<p><strong>Brought to You By:</strong></p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://antithesis.com/pragmatic"><strong>Antithesis</strong></a> – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://workos.com/"><strong>WorkOS</strong></a> – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.</p><p><strong>• </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://turbopuffer.com/pragmatic"><strong>turbopuffer</strong></a> – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable.</p><p>—</p><p>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.</p><p>In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast, we meet Dax Raad, co-founder of OpenCode, for a discussion about the gaps in developer tooling that led him to build OpenCode, the advantages of open source, and why taste and engineering judgment matter even more as AI becomes a core part of software development.</p><p>We also cover how OpenCode turned Anthropic’s blocking of integration with Claude Code into a massive growth lever by partnering with OpenAI and other model providers, why GPU demand is becoming a bottleneck everywhere, how come AI coding tools don’t automatically mean engineering teams move faster, and also why Dax is personally skeptical about predictions for the future of engineering and work, in general.</p><p>I found this conversation especially interesting because Dax displays a healthy skepticism toward the benefits of AI, even while building one of the most popular AI coding harnesses.</p><p>—</p><p><strong>Timestamps</strong></p><p>00:00 Intro</p><p>07:03 Dax’s path into tech</p><p>09:04 Early startup experience</p><p>13:16 Getting involved with open source</p><p>16:13 OpenCode</p><p>23:17 Anthropic banning OpenCode</p><p>30:34 From terminal to GUI</p><p>32:34 OpenCode’s business model</p><p>36:33 Why inference is profitable</p><p>39:11 GPU bottlenecks</p><p>40:54 AI hype</p><p>45:50 AI spending</p><p>48:47 Dax’s memo</p><p>55:41 Dax’s skepticism of predictions</p><p>58:58 Engineering culture at OpenCode</p><p>1:02:38 How building works at OpenCode</p><p>1:05:36 Taste and quality</p><p>1:11:32 Dax’s work setup</p><p>1:12:35 The role of engineers and EMs</p><p>1:15:50 Advice for engineers</p><p>1:18:12 Book recommendation</p><p>—</p><p><strong>The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:</strong></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-claude-code-is-built">How Claude Code is built</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-codex-is-built">How Codex is built</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/cursor">Real-world engineering challenges: building Cursor</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-ai-engineering-stack">The AI Engineering stack</a></p><p>• <a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-uber-uses-ai-for-development">How Uber uses AI for development: inside look</a></p><p>—</p><p>Production and marketing by <a target="_blank" href="https://penname.co/"></a><a target="_blank" href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineers-leading-projects">https://penname.co/</a>. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com.</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at <a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe</a>