The Pragmatic Engineer

The “Ralph method” and running multiple agents at once gain popularity, AI job cuts at dev tooling and education providers, four nines of uptime after quitting the cloud, and more

No longer a hypothetical question, this is a mega-trend set to hit the tech industry

The most-read articles of the year, plus some personal favorites, and a look back at a busy year in tech

Also: GitHub upsets devs by charging for self-hosted CI/CD, Warsaw could become the EU’s new “tech capital”, hiring juniors is profitable now, and more

Bryan Cantrill explains how decades of server and cloud evolution shaped modern infrastructure and what today’s engineers should learn from it.

What happens when there’s a massive outage at AWS? A member of AWS’s Incident Response team lifts the lid, after playing a key role in resolving the leading cloud provider’s most recent major outage

Also: inadequate capacity planning at AWS, how the engineering team at Oxide uses LLMs, Linux now supports Rust in the kernel, and more

Exclusive excerpts from the newly-released book ‘Frictionless’, by Nicole Forsgren and Abi Noda.

How engineers and teams use MCP servers: from debugging to working with legacy systems, & giving non-devs more access. Details from 40+ devs – with some surprises

Also: senior engineers might be more efficient with AI tools than juniors, Anthropic and Claude Code on a roll, and more.

Michelle Lim shares how to evaluate early-stage startup roles, negotiate equity, and grow into a high-impact founding engineer.

Evals are a new toolset for any and all AI engineers – and software engineers should also know about them. Move from guesswork to a systematic engineering process for improving AI quality.