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
David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder of 37signals, details his shift to an AI-first approach in software development. DHH recounts building Omachi, his Linux distribution, and notes Rails' resurgence due to its token efficiency for AI agent workflows. He emphasizes that 37signals valu...
Thuan Pham, former CTO of Uber, recounts his journey from a war refugee to a tech leader, emphasizing key lessons learned along the way. He details Uber's early engineering challenges, including rewriting the dispatch system and launching in China with an impossible two-month deadline. Pham explains the evolution of Ub...
Steve Yegge, a veteran software engineer, shares insights on AI's transformative impact on software engineering, highlighting its potential to reshape developer roles and company structures. He argues that AI augmentation, not replacement, is the key, cautioning against the "vampiric burnout effect" where increased pro...
The discussion centers on the evolution and impact of AI coding agents, particularly Claude Code. Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code and former Meta engineer, recounts his journey from early coding experiences to leading AI-driven code development. He details Claude Code's transition from a side project to a widely a...
The podcast explores the journey of Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder of HashiCorp, from his early days as a self-taught web programmer to building tools that power modern cloud infrastructure. Hashimoto recounts HashiCorp's origins, stemming from a failed university research project and a notebook of unsolved problems, t...
The podcast explores the creation and evolution of the Kotlin programming language with Andrey Breslav, its creator. Breslav recounts Kotlin's origins at JetBrains, driven by the need for a modern alternative to Java, and highlights key design principles such as pragmatic borrowing from languages like Scala and C. He d...
The podcast explores the history of software engineering through the lens of its "golden ages," with Grady Booch, a pioneer in object-oriented design, as the guest. Booch identifies three major eras, each marked by rising levels of abstraction and distinct challenges. The first age focused on algorithmic abstraction fo...
Peter Steinberger, creator of PSPDFKit and Clawdbot, discusses his journey in software development, his experience with burnout, and his new approach to coding using AI. He recounts building PSPDFKit, emphasizing the importance of user experience and developer satisfaction, and shares insights into enterprise sales and...
AWS S3's massive scale and engineering are explored with Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, VP of Data and Analytics at AWS, who has been running S3 for 13 years. S3, which holds over 500 trillion objects and serves hundreds of millions of transactions per second, manages tens of millions of hard drives across millions of servers...
The history of server and cloud infrastructure evolution from the late 1990s to today is explored with Bryan Cantrill, co-founder of Oxide and former engineer at Sun Microsystems and Joyent. Cantrill recounts the Dotcom Boom's frenetic energy and the surprising innovation spurred by the subsequent bust, highlighting Su...
In this episode of the podcast, Gergely Orosz interviews Michelle Lim, a founding software engineer at AI startup Warp and founder of Flint, about her experiences and insights into thriving in early-stage startups. Michelle shares her journey from interning at companies like Meta, Slack, and Robinhood to becoming a fou...
In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast, Gergely Orosz interviews Johannes Dahse, VP of Code Security at Sonar, about code security basics for software engineers. Dahse shares his background in penetration testing and emphasizes that code security is a shared responsibility, with developers owning code-relate...
In this interview podcast, Gergely Orosz interviews Martin Fowler, a software engineer and author, about how AI is changing software engineering. They discuss the shift from deterministic to non-deterministic systems, the importance of refactoring, and the role of AI in understanding legacy systems. Fowler shares his t...
In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer podcast, Gergely Orosz interviews Elizabeth Stone, CTO of Netflix, about the unique engineering challenges and culture at the streaming giant. Stone discusses the scale of Netflix's operations, including handling a trillion events daily and building custom software for studio p...
Chris Lattner, creator of LLVM and Swift, discusses the evolution of compiler technology and his work on the new language Mojo. He recounts the early days of LLVM, its adoption by Apple, and the challenges of convincing developers to switch to Swift, emphasizing the importance of community trust and clear communication...
In this episode of the podcast, Addy Osmani discusses the concept of "vibe coding" versus AI-assisted engineering, emphasizing that vibe coding is useful for quick prototyping but shouldn't replace traditional engineering principles for production-ready software. Osmani advocates for spec-driven development and testing...
In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast, Gergely Orosz and Elin Nilsson delve into Google's engineering culture, tech stack, and work environment. They discuss Google's massive scale, custom-built infrastructure (Borg, Piper, Critique), and unique approach to hiring and on-call responsibilities. The conversat...
In this interview, Armin Ronacher, creator of the Flask web framework and early engineer at Sentry, discusses programming languages, AI coding tools, and error handling. He compares Python, Rust, and Go, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses for different use cases, from infrastructure and binary data to web serv...
In this episode of the Pragmatic Engineer Podcast, Gergely Orosz interviews Charles-Axel Dein, an early engineer at Uber and current employee at CloudKitchens, about thriving in fast-growing startups. Charles shares his experiences at Uber during its hyper-growth phase, including the hectic hiring process, managing inc...
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