The Roots of Today's Modern Backend Engineering Practices
What accidentally taking down Amazon.com in 1997 taught Joshua Burgin; tech industry veteran and one of Amazon’s first 100 employees »
Asked to do something illegal at work? Here’s what these software engineers did
At FTX, Frank, and Pollen, software engineers were asked to do something potentially illegal, or to go along with what looked like fraud. They obliged in two out of three cases, landed in hot water, and now face jail time. A reminder why it’s never a good idea to go along with such requests. »
Handling a Regional Outage: Comparing the Response From AWS, Azure and GCP
This year, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud have all suffered comparable regional outages. How did they respond, and why do Azure’s processes stand out compared to its rivals? »
Code Review on Printed Paper: an Excerpt from the Twitoons Comic Book
👋 Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover topics related to Big Tech and startups through the lens of engineering managers and senior engineers. In this article, we cover »
Previous Articles
- Going from Developer to CEO: Chronosphere
- Working at a Startup vs in Big Tech
- Why are Cloud Development Environments Spiking in Popularity, Now?
- Bun: lessons from disrupting a tech ecosystem
- How Microsoft does Quality Assurance (QA)
- How Games Typically Get Built
- A senior engineer/EM job search story
- Are reports of StackOverflow’s fall greatly exaggerated?
- Google Shutting down Firebase Dynamic Links
- What is a Senior Software Engineer at Wise and Amazon?
- Building an an Early Stage Startup: Lessons from Akita Software
- The Pulse: VanMoof files for bankruptcy protection
- Twitter vs Instagram Threads: two different approaches to throttling
- Domain Registrars which Developers Recommend
- Google Domains to shut down
- An explosion in software engineers using AI coding tools?
- Inside Agoda’s Private Cloud - Exclusive
- Should you optimize for all-cash compensation, if possible?
- An educational side project
- Layoffs push down scores on Glassdoor: this is how companies respond
- Github Copilot and ChatGPT alternatives
- PagerDuty (and OpsGenie) alternatives
- Datadog’s $65M/year customer mystery solved
- Compensation at Publicly Traded Tech Companies
- Uber’s engineering level changes
- Is Critical Thinking the Most Important Skill for Software Engineers?
- The state of startup funding
- Behind the Scenes with Two New Salary Transparency Websites
- Lyft in Trouble
- Is there a drop in software engineer job openings, globally?
- Amazon doubling down on RTO (return to office) - exclusive
- The Collapse of Silicon Valley Bank
- Big Tech job-switching stats - exclusive
- Why did Google close its coding competitions after 20 years? Exclusive details.
- The job market for new grads: worse than in 2008, but better than 2002
- Apple cracking down to enforce its RTO policy - exclusive
- Apple: The Only Big Tech Giant Going Against the Job Cuts Tide
- What Big Tech layoffs suggest for the industry
- Inside Pollen's Software Engineering Salaries - Exclusive
- CircleCI’s unnoticed holiday security breach
- A Return to the Office (RTO) Wave?
- Twitter’s ongoing cruel treatment of software engineers
- Who is Still Hiring Software Engineers and EMs?
- The Scoop: Tech Layoffs in 2022
- Cruel Changes at Twitter
- The Scoop: Turmoil at Twitter
- The Big Tech Hiring Slowdown Is Here and it will Hurt
- Pollen’s enormous debt left behind: exclusive details
- Is the strategy of joining late-stage startups for the financial upside, a dead end?
- Will Facebook / Meta do engineering layoffs?
- Meta’s historic growth challenge
- Resiliency in Distributed Systems
- What is Data Engineering: Part 2
- Inside Pollen’s Collapse: “$200M Raised” but Staff Unpaid - Exclusive
- What is Data Engineering?
- Inside the Shutdown of Zenly by Snap
- The Scoop: Netflix’s historic introduction of levels for software engineers - exclusive
- I removed all affiliate links from my blog: numbers
- Three years of advertising on my blog: numbers
- Advice for Less Experienced Software Engineers in the Current Tech Market
- Oncall Compensation for Software Engineers
- Companies Using RFCs or Design Docs and Examples of These
- Shipping to Production
- Inside the Layoffs at Klarna
- Job Ads to Hire Software Engineers: My Advice
- Becoming a Full-Time Creator as a Software Engineer: Controversial Advice
- Big Tech and the reality of scaling customer support
- Migrations Done Well: Typical Migration Approaches
- Notable Internal Systems at Amazon
- The Ukraine War - and Its Impact on the Tech Industry
- What TPMs Do and What Software Engineers Can Learn From Them
- Becoming a Better Writer as a Software Engineer
- Coaches and Mentors for Engineering Managers and Engineering Leaders
- Holiday Book Recommendations for Software Engineers, Engineering Managers and Product Managers
- Hiring (and Retaining) a Diverse Engineering Team
- Exceptional Off-Cycle Compensation Adjustments for Software Engineers in 2021
- Platform Teams
- How I Motivate Myself to Write
- Incident Review and Postmortem Best Practices
- Reverse Interviewing Your Future Manager and Team
- The Pragmatic Engineer Test: 12 Questions on Engineering Culture
- How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum
- The Most Heated Tech Job Market in History: Advice for Software Engineers
- The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech
- My "Investment Mindset"
- Donating My Time to Grow a VC-Funded Company: Why I Quit Mentoring at Plato
- I Want to Hire Someone, But My Team Said No to on the Debrief: Ask the EM
- I Spent $5,000 Advertising My Free Book to iOS and Android Engineers
- Uber's Crazy YOLO App Rewrite, From the Front Seat
- Dependency Injection in iOS and Android Apps
- A Checklist For First-Time Engineering Managers
- EMPOWERED Review: I Needed This Book 4 Years Ago
- The Trimodal Nature of Software Engineering Salaries in the Netherlands and Europe
- Preparing for the Systems Design and Coding Interview
- Equity 101 for Software Engineers at Big Tech and Startups
- Mobile Platform Teams
- Want to Learn about Entrepreneurship, as a Software Engineer? Sell Something Online.
- 10 Engineering Challenges Due to the Nature of Mobile Applications
- Writing a Performance Self Review for Software Engineers - With an Example
- Templates as Inspiration for Software Engineers and Engineering Managers
- Common Performance Review Biases: How to Spot and Counter Them
- System Design Interview Book Review: Finally, a Book for Getting Better at Architecting Systems
- What Becoming an Engineering Manager Feels Like
- What Silicon Valley "Gets" about Software Engineers that Traditional Companies Do Not
- My Unforgettable Uber Ride
- Ask the EM: How Can I work Better with My Product Manager, as an Engineering Lead?
- Advice to Myself When Starting Out as a Software Developer
- Data Structures & Algorithms I Used Working at Tech Companies
- Can You Really Measure Individual Developer Productivity? - Ask the EM
- The Cheetah Software Engineer
- Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager: My Book Review and Notes
- Architecture Jams: a Collaborative Way of Designing Software
- Surprising Things About Working at Well-Known Tech Unicorns
- I Feel Stuck as a Staff Engineer, Wanting to Move Into an EM Role - Ask the EM
- A Software Engineering Culture Test
- Paper debugging
- Tech Debt and the Pragmatic Middle Ground
- The Pyramid of Unit Testing Benefits
- I'm Acting as The Team's Lead, But I'm Not Actually One - Ask the EM
- Refactoring Typescript: My Book Review
- How Can I Prepare to Eventually Move into Engineering Management? - Ask the EM
- How to Lead a Project - as a Software Engineer
- Performance Reviews for Software Developers – How I Do Them In a (Hopefully) Fair Way
- The 2010s in Software Development
- Distributed systems learnings in 2019
- Readable Code
- I'm Writing a Book on Growing as a Software Developer
- Don't Work Alone When You're a New or Junior Engineer
- An Engineering Team where Everyone is a Leader
- A Philosophy of Software Design: My Take (and a Book Review)
- Working at Silicon Valley Companies - in Europe
- Stretching, Executing, Coasting - and Pacing Yourself to Avoid Burnout
- Talk First, Code Later
- Seniority for Software Engineers: a Tech Talk
- Yes, You Should Estimate Software Projects
- Stop Calling it Bad Code
- Software Developer Promotions: Advice to Get to That Next Level
- Software Architecture is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design is Underrated
- Growth hacks: coffee with an experienced engineer you don’t know
- The Product-Minded Software Engineer
- Developers mentoring other developers: practices I've seen work well
- An Elegant Puzzle Book Review: an Overdue Read for Software Engineering Leads
- Operating a Large, Distributed System in a Reliable Way: Practices I Learned
- Good Code Reviews, Better Code Reviews
- Undervalued Software Engineering Skills: Writing Well
- Pull request best practices
- Scaling Engineering Teams via RFCs: Writing Things Down
- Efficient Software Project Management at its Roots
- Distributed architecture concepts I learned while building a large payments system
- Seven things that helped me move into engineering management
- Things I've learned transitioning from engineer to engineering manager
- Transitioning From Objective C to Swift in 4 Steps - Without Rewriting The Existing Code
- My Code Ended Up Running an Oil Rig. These are the 5 Things I Learned.
- What Agile Really Means
- A Comment Is An Invitation For Refactoring
- The Software Development Dilemma: Move Fast without Breaking Things?
- Swift: The Only Modern Language without Mocking Frameworks
- Getting Into the Zone with a Single Pomodoro
- From Software Developer to Software Engineer