The Pragmatic Engineer

Startups and scaleups are on a hiring spree for a software engineering role pioneered by Palantir. A deepdive into this role, and why FDEs are so popular in 2025

How are VC funding, hiring, and founder trends shifting—and what does it mean for software engineers at startups? Extensive data discussed with Peter Walker, Head of Insights at Carta.

A guide to creating SDKs that devs – and LLMs – will find a breeze to use, plus an overview of modern approaches for building and maintaining SDKs. By veteran SDK engineer, Quentin Pradet

Also: mystery solved about dozens of outages on 10 June, reflections on a year at OpenAI, and more

Laura Tacho, CTO of DX, shares findings from 180+ companies on how AI is really impacting dev productivity, what most teams get wrong, and why measuring dev experience first is critical.

What are the lessons of large outages at Heroku, Google Cloud, and Neon? Plus, how responses to outages can be as informative as incidents themselves…

Also: the complicated story of the Windsurf sale, beginning of the end for VC-subsidized tokens, and more.

Steve Yegge shares why Google struggles with platforms, how AI coding is deceptively hard, and why the "AI Fixer" role could be one spreading inside tech companies, in the future.

Which tools do software engineers use for backend development, frontend, infrastructure, AI tooling, and more, today? Reader survey, with feedback and analysis, based on 3,000+ responses

Finally, relief: tax regulation hurting the US tech industry is striked off for good - for the most part, that is. Also: why Meta is “going to war” to poach AI researchers from OpenAI, and more.

Former Amazon Principal Engineer Steve Huynh shares what it takes to reach the Principal level, why the jump Principal is so tough at Amazon, and how Amazon’s scale and culture shaped his career.

Helpful software engineering, AI engineering, and robotics fundamentals to know for getting into robotics. Also: advice about studying this exciting discipline at university