Paid subscribers can watch all sessions here, as they are uploaded:

Links to talks:

Read more

As of today, the newsletter has 1,073,929 readers, of whom more than 200,000 have joined in the past year alone. Special thanks to paying subscribers, who get full access to all deepdives, issues of The Pulse, as well as extra resources for career growth, and content for engineering leaders. I’d like to thank everyone who reads this publication; your support is truly valued.

In this final article of 2025, I look back on the year and suggest some articles and pod episodes worth revisiting – or checking out for the first time.

Today, we cover:

1. Most popular articles. Five of the most-read, and five of my personal favorites

2. Podcast. Memorable episodes to check out

3. Tech industry in 2025. AI dominated the conversation and trends, the job market was weird, RTO accelerated, and much else

4. The Software Engineer’s Guidebook. Four more translations, a hardcover edition, and a best-seller in Japan!

See also annual reviews in 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021.

1. Most popular articles

Over the course of the year, the articles below are the ones which were read by the most subscribers.

1. How Claude Code is built. Claude Code took the industry by storm in 2025, and we sat down with two of its founding engineers. They revealed how they helped make command line interfaces (CLIs) surprisingly relevant in such a short space of time.

2. State of the software engineering job market in 2025. It’s been a bizarre 12 months in the job market, when job seekers struggled to hear back about their applications, and employers found it hard to hire solid engineers. We delved into the state of things in a three-part series on data (part 1), what hiring managers saw (part 2), and job seekers’ personal stories (part 3).

3. Real-world engineering challenges: building Cursor. Founded in 2023, Cursor became one of the most – if not the most popular – dev tools this year. A deepdive into its tech stack, engineering decisions, and the database migrations which took place behind the scenes.

4. MCP Protocol: a new AI dev-tooling building block. The Model Context Protocol that extends AI capabilities for both IDEs and AI agents. An in-depth look at the technology with its co-creator, David Soria Parra.

5. AI fakers exposed in dev recruitment: postmortem. In March, a full-remote startup nearly hired a backend engineer who didn’t exist, after they used an AI filter and a fake resume to try and hoodwink recruiters. It’s also possible the scammer was a North Korean agent. Indeed, just a few days ago, Amazon caught one posing as a US contractor. Incidents like these have probably helped contribute to a decline in the number of remote jobs, and made it harder to get hired.

My personal favorites:

1. AI Engineering in the real world. What does AI engineering look like in practice? Hands-on examples and learnings from software engineers turned “AI engineers” at seven companies – with inspiration for how it’s relatively easy for a software engineer to become an “AI engineer.”

2. Inside Google’s Engineering Culture. A broad, deep dive into how Google works from the perspective of SWEs and eng managers.

3. What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? Startups and scaleups went on a hiring spree for a software engineering role pioneered by Palantir. A deepdive into the role, and why FDEs became so popular this year.

4. Cross-platform mobile development. Cross-platform mobile development was on the rise in 2025. An in-depth look into the most popular frameworks: React Native, Flutter, native-first, and web-based technologies, and how to pick the right approach

5. The 10x “overemployed” engineer. One improbable story this year was that of a clearly talented software engineer who tricked more than a dozen Silicon Valley startups. He aced the interviews and got hired – then proceeded to do almost zero work, all the while collecting paychecks and seeking out more job interviews. The music stopped for this blagger when one frustrated founder who’d hired and fired him went public.

See all deepdives of 2025 here.

2. The podcast

I launched The Pragmatic Engineer podcast 18 months ago because I was having interesting conversations with tech folks during research for the written articles, and it felt like a bit of a waste to not share these talks with readers in more detail. Overall, I’ve been very happy with the decision to experiment with the podcast format.

This has been the pod’s first full year, and the feedback has been positive. When I meet people at conferences and events, around a third say they discovered The Pragmatic Engineer via the podcast. At the end of this year, the podcast has crossed 10M downloads across YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other apps. In 2026, I’ll prioritize quality over quantity even more, so expect two or three episodes per month on Wednesdays.

Here are some highlights from the podcast in 2025, which are good places to start if you’re diving into the show for the first time:

1. How Linux is built with Greg Kroah-Hartman: the longtime Linux kernel maintainer breaks down the inner workings of Linux development; from its unique trust model, to the benefits of open-source contribution. This is the episode that was most popular with listeners this year, judging by the feedback.

2. Netflix’s Engineering Culture. A very rare peek into how engineering works at the streaming giant, with CTO Elizabeth Stone.

3. The Philosophy of Software Design – with John Ousterhout: why thoughtful software design matters more than ever, as AI transforms coding practices and developer workflows.

4. From Software Engineer to AI Engineer – with Janvi Kalra. Janvi impressed tech leaders after teaching herself AI engineering. She discusses the tactics and focus that helped her get into OpenAI.

5. How Swift and Mojo were created with Chris Lattner. A conversation about how better language and compiler design can open the door to faster, more accessible AI development, with one of the most productive software engineers around.

6. How AI will change software engineering – with Martin Fowler. Thoughtworks’s Chief Architect and author of the bestselling books Refactoring and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, provides a level-headed take on what AI really means for the tech biz.

7. Measuring the impact of AI on software engineering – with Laura Tacho. Findings from 180+ companies on how AI really affects devs’ productivity – and what many teams get wrong.

8. Code Complete with Steve McConnell. Code Complete is one of the all-time most popular books on software engineering. Author Steve McConnell gives a rare interview and shares some career principles that every engineer should know.

9. Building Figma Slides with Noah Finer and Jonathan Kaufman. Behind the scenes on how a hackathon project turned into a polished product at Figma. Key engineering decisions, challenges, and practices.

10. Design-first software engineering: Craft – with Balint Orosz. You may not know I have a brother who also works in tech. Balint is the founder of the award-winning notes app, Craft Docs. An interview about what it’s like to be a design-first software engineer.

See all podcast episodes here.

If you have any recommendations for interesting guests for me to invite onto the podcast in 2026, you can let me know by replying to this email or via this form.

3. Tech industry in 2025

The main theme of 2025 has, of course, been AI, and how it’s changing software engineering – but we also covered numerous other matters and emerging trends.

1. The AI coding tools explosion. Claude Code rapidly became a favorite of devs, Cursor grew to be the most popular AI coding tool, the term “vibe coding” went mainstream (and was even pronounced ‘Word of the Year’ by Collins Dictionary – despite being two words), the MCP protocol won wide adoption, and coding with agents slowly overtook using AI for “just” autocomplete.

2. Weird job market stays tight. As we covered in the state of the software engineering job market in 2025 series, 2025 saw many professionals experience more struggle than usual to land the next job – except AI engineers and senior+ engineers with eye-catching resumes.

3. RTO acceleration. Amazon mandated a 5-day return to office in January 2025, and Instagram will do so from February 2026. Meanwhile, the share of full-remote jobs kept falling.

4. Decline of StackOverflow. This started before ChatGPT launched, but LLMs seem to have accelerated the decline. New generations of developers may have no idea what StackOverflow is, nor what made it so important in the 2010s.

5. AI-fueled cheating crisis. Remote algorithmic interviews provide little signal these days, now that invisible tools help candidates ace them without much preparation. In response, some companies allow AI tools in interviews and set more ambitious problems, while others restore in-person interviews. More on this in Ban or embrace AI in tech interviews? and How AI is changing tech interviews.

6. OpenAI’s aggressive expansion. The leading AI lab didn’t slow down in 2025, and is valued at a jaw-dropping $500B. It became a for-profit, launched a browser to compete with Chrome, bought experimentation platform Statsig for $1B, probably spent more than $170M this year on Datadog, and is making plans to go public.

7. AI surprises. Senior engineers use AI coding tools more efficiently than juniors, but equally, juniors are more “profitable” than before due to faster onboarding. AI seems to amplify coding knowledge for seniors, and could help juniors become seniors faster. Even though engineers at AI startups can usually use AI tools without any kind of budget limits – it is also AI startups which set extreme working hours cultures in their bid to outrun competition.

Weekly editions of The Pulse on Thursdays provided the latest news from around tech. Check out previous issues.

4. The Software Engineer’s Guidebook

It’s been two years since I published The Software Engineer’s Guidebook for navigating senior, tech lead, staff, and principal positions at established tech companies and startups. In November, I shared a recap to mark two years since publication, including learnings from taking the self-publishing route.

The book has now sold more than 40,000 copies, proving it was worth spending a very lengthy four years on writing it! This year, it was translated into four more languages, and is available in Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese editions, Mongolian, German, and Korean.

In Mongolia, a 30-person startup did the translation, and this summer I flew over to visit them. It was there that I learned that the company which hosted me – Nasha Tech – also builds the Uber Eats of Mongolia.

A delightful moment was learning that the Japanese edition was a bestseller of the week at Tokyo’s largest bookstore:

As a fun fact, the Japanese edition is printed in a special way: it reads vertically (top to bottom), and right to left. The publisher – O’Reilly Japan – told me it’s an unusual but purposeful choice for a technical book:

“Generally, novels and typical non-fiction books use vertical writing, which requires right binding (right-to-left reading). Technical books, due to code snippets, are usually written horizontally with left binding.

However, for The Software Engineer’s Guidebook, we intentionally chose vertical writing with right-side binding so that readers can take their time with the content. It’s quite an unusual choice for an O’Reilly Japan book”.

In November, a hardcover edition was published, which I decided to do after a reader asked to have their paperback signed, and I saw it was in poor condition due to heavy usage, with lots of notes and highlights. Softcovers don’t withstand lots of heavy use, and seeing that beaten-up copy was the final prompt to create the hardcover.

As a reader of this newsletter, you can get access to the bonus section of the book: 100 pages with ten online-only chapters. Get them here.

Happy Holidays!

With that, the newsletter and podcast head off for a winter break. I wish you and your loved ones a very happy holiday, with time to rest. If you end up being oncall during this period, fingers crossed for a completely uneventful one. If your company has code freezes in place for this period, this could help with that.

Thank you for reading this newsletter and listening to the podcast in 2025; there’s more to come in 2026.

Have a good one – see you in January!

In order to help you give gifts which are actually wanted this year, Elin, of this publication, and I have put together a list of ideas in this article. Alongside personal recommendations, we’ve also crowdsourced recommendations from fellow techies on X, Bluesky, and Threads, covering:

1. Office accessories

2. Computer add-ons

3. Health and well-being

4. Gadgets

5. Gaming and games

6. Travel & wearables

7. Books and stationery

8. Kitchen goodies

Many products listed below are currently discounted in the sales, and the Pragmatic Engineer is also offering a very special Black Friday / Cyber Monday deal for annual subscriptions. Claim it here until Monday.

As always, none of the links below are affiliates (meaning I make no money from purchases), and I’ve not been paid to mention any product or category. See my ethics statement for more.

For more recommendations, see our holiday gift guide from 2023 and book recommendations from 2021.

Programming note: this week, we’ll have a podcast episode tomorrow (Wednesday), and no edition of The Pulse on Thursday. Regular programming resumes next week after Thanksgiving.

1. Office accessories

Ember Temperature Control Mug – keeps coffee or tea warm, even when it’s forgotten about because you’re focused on coding or other tasks. A hot drink stays drinkable for up to 1.5 hours, thanks to its built-in battery that charges on a nifty wireless-charging coaster.

Tumblers and coffee mugs that keep drinks at the desired temperature can make it easier to stay hydrated throughout the day. They are insulated, made from stainless steel, and make great gifts for anyone who works at a desk. Popular brands include Stanley, Yeti, and Thermoflask. You can also search for stainless steel tumblers.

CO2 monitor. One of my personal favorite recent purchases is a carbon dioxide monitor for my office. When CO2 concentration is high (above 1,000 ppm), it’s harder to focus and easier to become drowsy. A monitor detects when levels are raised, meaning you can make changes like open the window, or raise the matter of ventilation at work. In my opinion, you can’t go wrong with almost any CO2 monitor.

Programmable mini-desk terminal. These are always a hit for devs, and a popular option is the Ulanzi TC001 Smart Pixel Clock 2882. It comes by default as a clock, but can be custom programmed; for example, to show a pomodoro timer (25-minute countdown).

To program it – and build your own custom matrix clocks – you need to flash a custom firmware like AWTRIX3. See more details on the Ulanzi blog, and on the AWTRIX3 getting started page.

Wired / wireless charging stations. Almost all new phones and small devices are shipping with USB-C ports, so a USB-C-only charging station is increasingly practical. There’s no shortage of options, and here’s a tasteful variant: the Oakwood Dual Dock

In his gift guide, Lenny Ratchisky recommends the Belkin MagSafe 3-in-1 charger.

2. Computer accessories

Techies unavoidably spend A LOT of time with our computers, so a premium accessory often makes for a good gift.

A comfortable mouse. Given we use one all day, a mouse that feels good for your hand and that can be customized, should be a solid choice. The Logitech MX Master 3 is recommended by software dev Brian Cooley. I’m personally a fan of Logitech Mice; they come in all shapes and sizes, with both wireless and wired versions.

Quality noise-cancelling headphones. These can offer a massive quality-of-work improvement for anyone in an open-plan office, coffee shops, or who likes to get in the zone with some music. My go-to pair is the Bose QuietComfort Ultra; I have one in the office, and one in my backpack at all times. Other popular options include the Sony WH-1000XM5, the Apple AirPods Max, and the Sennheiser Momentum 4.

Mechanical keyboard. These provide superior typing and improved durability. A popular brand is Das Keyboard. Other choices include Logitech mechanical keyboards, the quiet Razer Pro Type Ultra, and many others.

Quality microphone. For those who spend a lot of time on video calls, upgrading from the built-in laptop mic can be a nice improvement for those on the other end of a call. The Shure MV7 is a popular choice. For a more compact microphone, the Yeti Nano can also work well.

3. Health and well-being

Massage vouchers. Most of us working in tech spend too much time staring at screens, so a massage voucher should be appreciated.

Experiences. Of course, a great gift doesn’t have to be an object, and a few less conventional ideas have been successes with techies, according to Candy Evans:

• Walking with alpacas

• Making French pastries

• Whisky tasting

There is much more, like high rope courses, indoor skydiving, and even bobsledding. Get creative: it could make for something very memorable!

Escape rooms are a fun activity, usually for groups of 2-6. You need to solve a series of puzzles, usually within an hour, and work together to succeed under pressure of the countdown.

“Escape room in a box” is a companion concept, where you have an escape room experience at home, as a board game focused on puzzle solving.

WHOOP subscription. A return recommendation from last year: track biometrics such as skin temperature, blood oxygen level, and more. The battery lasts more than 2 weeks, and a subscription offers the option to upgrade to the latest models.

Coffee, tea, matcha. These are rarely a miss and many vendors offer subscription coffee or tea products. Here are two personal recommendations:

• Terminal: coffee subscription for devs, built by devs, accessible from your terminal. It has an API as well, and you can place an order using SSH. Ships to the US.

• Keats&Co – coffee and tea, including subscription. All profits go to charity.

Apple Watch Ultra. I got mine this year and am very happy with it. It provides basic sleep tracking, workout tracking, and notifications – and also supports payments (very convenient on vacation, or if you want to be phone-free.) It motivated me to take sleep and workouts more seriously. The battery lasts around 2 days – much less than the Whoop, but I find it manageable.

Sunbasin soap and shampoo bars. These offer a lathery, soapy clean, and the shampoo comes in bar form, which is novel and makes it convenient for travel.

Sunrise alarm clock. Wake up easier with an alarm clock that simulates a sunrise. One popular edition is the Philips SmartSleep Wake-up Light. There is a large variety; just search “sunrise alarm clocks”.

Foldable walking pad. I have one at home, and it’s been a moderate success. I originally tried it as an under-the-desk walking pad – which was okay, but I felt dizzy when walking at higher speeds for extended periods. Nonetheless, plenty of techies swear by its efficiency, and they’re increasingly affordable. Just search “walking pads” for options.

4. Gadgets

Flipper Zero. When I ask techies about gifts they’ve enjoyed, the number one recommendation is still the Flipper Zero from two years ago. A multi-tool for security folks and those who enjoy hacking around with signals and hardware. Practical use cases include turning it into a universal infrared remote, a Bluetooth remote, and testing and debugging remote frequency (RF) gear like car key fobs with it. It’s also a great way to get hands-on with RF, NFC/RFID and embedded protocols, and basic firmware development.

Boox Palma 2. Phone-sized tablets with e-ink that also kind of work like a phone – except without phone calls and SMS support. It runs open Android and has Google Play support. So, you can install and use Android apps on a minimalist device that also helps with being more mindful about screentime. It has integrated speakers, a camera, Bluetooth – and the Palma Pro 2 model actually does support a SIM card for cellular data.

Daylight DC-1. An Android-based computer designed for deep focus and well-being. Uses a reflective “Live Paper” LCD display with a blue-light-free experience. It’s designed to minimize eye strain and support better sleep health. Includes backlighting.

reMarkable Paper Tablet – touted as a replacement for notebooks and other books, which enables handwriting and annotating of PDFs. It has around two weeks of battery life, and does not include backlighting.

Supernote writing tablet — a digital notebook, and frequently cited as an alternative to the reMarkable, offering similar functionality. Read a comparison between the two and more experiences shared on the Supernote Reddit forum.

Small 3D printer. Practical things techies can print include cable organizers, monitor risers, mouse trays, or tool holders for the desk. But then, there’s so much more you can do, as it can print pretty much any 3D model! A popular recommendation is the Bambu Lab A1 Mini 3D Printer.

Pixel dice. A nice gift for tabletop gamers. Edit how the dice behaves and lights up with a companion app. The hardware engineering details behind the dice are an interesting read.

YubiKey. A hardware two-factor authentication passkey that is generally more secure than app-based 2FA, and also more resistant to phishing. If you plan to gift one, it’s worth giving two, so the person setting up the Yubikey has a backup key – with key services like email, banking, and others – in case it gets lost.

JetKVM – control your computer remotely, with a low latency of 30-60ms. KVM stands for Keyboard, Video, Mouse: this open source gadget lets you control your machine at home, over the internet. Read a review of this gadget.

5. Gaming

Nintendo Switch 2 – an upgrade on its predecessor with better performance, more storage, and an improved Joy-Con design. It has a wide range of games, and likely the biggest collection of family-friendly and collaborative games, like Mario Party.

ModRetro Chromatic. A Game Boy-like device created by Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus and Anduril. Each game comes on a cartridge, just like with old handhelds.

The game catalog is smaller than ideal – but in July this year, Luckey shared big plans, writing:

“We have a huge slate of content coming from some of the best developers in the industry, starting with an all-new physical Tetris cartridge that will come bundled with each and every Chromatic, just as it did with every original Game Boy® released in North America. We will also be launching all-physical re-releases and remasters of classic Game Boy® titles, entirely new IP from incredible indie developers, first-time launches of Game Boy® games that were canceled before release, and even some titles that were canceled before the public ever found out about them.”

Playdate. A tiny-handled homage to old-school gaming. The crank on the side brings a new type of gaming experience, and the platform is home to lots of clever indie games. This device has become a family favorite in our home, and was also a recommendation in the 2023 gift guide.

Board games. Playing board games is a great group activity. A recent guest on the Pragmatic Engineer Podcast, Martin Fowler, is a big fan of them, so I asked which one he recommends. He said:

“It’s a tricky one because it’s a little bit like saying ‘I’m really into watching movies. Which one would you recommend?’ There are so many different tastes.

If I wanted to pick one that is not too complicated to get into, but still has a lot of richness: at the moment I would pick the game Concordia. Fairly abstract in its nature, but it’s easy to get into and it’s got a good bit of decision making in the process.”

6. Travel & wearables

A light, sturdy backpack for commuting. Tom Karlo, PM at Meta, recommends the Dyneema Daypack as light and durable.

Cadence magnetic travel containers. Leakproof travel-size jars for storing liquids like shampoo, body wash, and vitamins, or even jewelry. Both the jar and the lid are magnetic, making them easy to keep track of. Very useful when travelling, and also handy at home.

Bellroy Tech Kit – a pouch for keeping cables, an adapter, and a mouse, in one place when traveling.

Meta glasses. Launched in September, these are the best smart glasses on the market. A review by The Verge concluded that they offer better battery life, but “still have the tricky issue of being a camera, right on your face.”

It’s new technology, novel, and something many techies might not get for themselves, but which could definitely be interesting for AR enthusiasts. Software engineer Alvin Sng – who works at Factory AI – used his pair to record a “day in the life” video at Factory AI.

Airtags. Always a useful gift for friends or family in the Apple ecosystem for tracking objects and also wandering kids. Obvious use cases include luggage, keys, autos, and more.

Car jump starter + power bank + flashlight. I got one of these when my car’s battery died, and it’s been around ever since. It’s my go-to power bank when I need to plug something in, and serves as a reserve flashlight.

7. Books and stationery

Books are always a great gift for the holidays, when there’s usually more time to read. Specifically for tech, I previously shared 100+ recommendations. Since that article, a few books have been published that I’ve enjoyed:

From my collection of titles:

• Tidy First by Kent Beck. A short, impactful read. Check out an excerpt: Dead code, getting untangled, and coupling versus decoupling

• The Engineering Executive’s Primer by Will Larson. Read an excerpt: Getting an engineering executive job.

• Frictionless by Nicole Forsgren and Abi Noda. AI can generate code in minutes, so why does shipping software still take forever? This book answers that question, and offers practical advice on how to reduce friction in dev teams. Released just last week.

• Engineering management for the rest of us by Sarah Drasner. An approachable, practical title about how to be a better engineering leader.

• AI Engineering by Chip Huyen. Probably the best book on AI Engineering. Read an excerpt: The AI Engineering stack.

• The Software Engineer’s Guidebook by myself, is now available in hardcover and makes for a good gift. More on why I wrote this book.

• The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025 by Dwarkesh Patel. An educational overview of the evolution of LLMs. Worth reading to understand more.

Find further recommendations on Amazon and Goodreads.

Stone paper notebooks. Stone paper is a tea-proof and waterproof sheet – which makes this format really practical. Some people love the feel of writing in them and others don’t, but you won’t know until you try! Popular brands include Moyu (erasable notebooks), Daily Bliss, and Karst Goods.

Analog TO-DO list. Analog is an offline TO-DO system that works like this:

• Write 10 tasks on a “Today” card at the beginning of the day

• Mark tasks as “in progress”, “delegated” or “completed”

• Move unfinished tasks either to a new “Today” card, or to a “Next” or “Someday” card

With so many digital TO-DO lists, an offline version feels refreshing!

2026 journal / planner. For those in your life who are organized and like to plan – and also perhaps for those who do neither, but would like to be less chaotic.

Small, portable photo printers. Turning your digital snaps into physical objects with a printer can be a lot of fun, and transforms them into permanent momentos. Instax, Polaroid, and HP Sprocket are popular portable options. It’s also easier than ever to print photos and create photo books online if you don’t want to buy a printer.

Elin uses a Canon Selphy CP1500 for postcard-sized and credit card-sized photos, and it comes with a nifty collage feature:

8. Kitchen goodies

One place to escape the screen is the kitchen, and, although it’s not an obvious source of gift ideas for techies, there are many cool kitchen gadgets that are useful, day-to-day.

The Scizza. If scissors and a pizza slicer had a baby, it would be the Scizza. We got one from a friend, and it has become a family favorite, and a source of amusement for guests – followed by “where can I get one?”

Soda machine. Why buy soda when you can make your own and choose the flavours? There’s a growing selection of domestic soda makers like Sodastream, and Aarke, which is more high-end and looks gorgeous.

Origami Dripper Coffee Brewer. An aesthetically pleasing way to brew coffee. See a guide on how it’s done.

Airfryer. One of the most useful kitchen tools I own; it makes cooking healthier (no oils), convenient, and fast. Popular brands include Ninja, Cosori, Philips, Instant (by Insignia), Tefal, and Breville.

Useful kitchen tools: These should be welcome items for people who don’t yet own them.

The Chef’s Press. For people who enjoy roasted food, this helps prepare delicious meals.

Takeaways

I hope this list of seasonal gift ideas is useful. For tech professionals, the perfect gift doesn’t have to be a cool gadget; it could equally be something that pulls us away from the screen! And in keeping with the sentimental tone of the season, perhaps the best gift of all which we can give is spending time with those we care about most.

If you have more suggestions, add them in the comments!

Leave a comment

Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter — with a special announcement. Note that this is a personal recommendation — and a deal I initiated with two tools I’ve been using as a paid customer to replace my Google Search usage the last year. It is not a paid advert: I have not received any monetary or other compensation for sharing this offer. I have no affiliation with either of the companies mentioned below. See more in my ethics statement. It’s the first-ever such announcement since the start of The Pragmatic Engineer three years ago — and I do not plan to do these frequently.

I’m excited to share a unique perk for all annual paying subscribers to The Pragmatic Engineer. Starting today, you now get access to:

• Perplexity Pro for 12 months (worth $200)

• Kagi Ultimate for 3 months (worth $75)

You don’t need to share credit card details or payment information to access this deal.

This deal only applies to new Perplexity and Kagi customers. Annual subscribers are eligible. Cancelling a newsletter subscription deactivates the code supplied.

If you’re not yet a paid subscriber to The Pragmatic Engineer, you can upgrade here.

How did these offers come about?

Some background: for about a year, I’ve been using Kagi Professional as my default search engine, after deciding to drop Google Search. Meanwhile, for deep research and highly nuanced web search, my choice is Perplexity Pro.

I want to mention that I haven’t been paid to mention these startups – in fact, I reached out to them! I’m actually a longterm user of both products, and want to give subscribers the opportunity to discover them, too. So, I approached the companies about offering trials.

I’m pleased to say that Kagi and Perplexity were each open to offering multi-month free trials to subscribers of The Pragmatic Engineer. For Kagi, it’s the first time they’ve made such an offer via a third party.

Let’s tackle the elephant in the room: why would you pay for search? I certainly never thought I would. But the reason I do so today, is that I’m tired of being “the product” for search engines. Every time I execute a search, I have to scroll through sponsored results that are mixed into organic ones. I also have a nagging sense that search engine results are degrading over time. The likes of Google care more about maximizing ad revenue than they care about serving up high-quality, helpful search results.

Finally, as a tech professional and someone who believes in the benefits of competitive markets, it’s refreshing to see startups challenge the monopolistic Big Tech dominance of search with new, alternative approaches. Perplexity is barely two years old, and already a challenger to Google. And Kagi offers unusual transparency behind their exact usage numbers and customer numbers by sharing realtime platform stats.

Perplexity has built a product that feels like a new type of search; one which delivers research to your fingertips via a search engine, complete with references (links) about where the information has been sourced from. This lets you double check how legitimate the sources are, and so using such a tool can strengthen the credibility of your work.

Meanwhile, Kagi is building a privacy-first, user-first version of Google search without VC funding or ads. The results it serves feel much more like “hits”, than the “misses” I’ve come to expect from Google. Check out the Kagi team’s view on the real cost of “free search.”

What you get from Perplexity Pro and Kagi Ultimate

What you get with Perplexity Pro:

• Pro searches. A Pro search conducts thorough research to provide in-depth, accurate responses to questions. It’s particularly useful for summarising, data analysis, debugging, and content generation, making it the perfect tool for developers and data scientists. More about Pro search features.

• Powerful AI models. Search using a choice of advanced AI models, each with its own unique strengths. Choose from GPT-4 Omni (advanced reasoning), Claude 3 Sonnet and Haiku (natural-sounding responses and file uploads), Sonar Large 32k (conciseness and accuracy). You can even use the new DeepSeek R1 reasoning model (hosted with Perplexity) and OpenAI o1 reasoning model.

• Document Analysis: Upload text and data files to search the web and also internal knowledge bases.

What you get with Kagi Ultimate:

• Unlimited Kagi searches. Lightning-fast, no ads and no tracking, and the ability to block domains. Popular domains users block include Pinterest, Daily Mail, and Quora.

• The Assistant access. The Assistant by Kagi combines top large language models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google and Mistral) with optional results from Kagi Search, making it the perfect companion for creative, research, and programming tasks. More details about The Assistant.

Get Perplexity Pro and Kagi Ultimate

Next up: deepdive on both startups

Tomorrow, we publish a deepdive on the engineering cultures of Perplexity and Kagi. Both these startups are building alternatives to Google Search, and each has its own distinct approach and engineering culture. Read the deepdive here: Taking on Google search: Perplexity and Kagi.

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This holiday season marks the end of the third year of The Pragmatic Engineer as my full-time focus, following more than a decade working as a software engineer and engineering manager. In 2024, a total of 103 newsletter issues have been read by subscribers, and this article is number 104. You received deep dives on Tuesdays, The Pulse on Thursdays, and since October, there’s podcast episodes every other Wednesday.

As of today, there’s an incredible 866,461 readers of this newsletter, which is higher than the population of San Francisco; more than 300,000 of whom arrived in the past year alone. Special thanks to paying subscribers, who get access to all deep dives, issues of The Pulse, resources for engineering managers and software engineers, and other perks. And thank you to every reader; I truly value your support.

Today, we cover:

1. Most popular articles. Five of the most-read, and five of my favorites.

2. Tech in 2024. AI is changing software engineering, but not as fast as some expected

3. Evolution of the Pragmatic Engineer newsletter. The new podcast, more industry research than ever, and valid tracking the tech pulse in real time.

4. The Software Engineer’s Guidebook. Two translations, one audiobook, and more than 30,000 copies sold.

See the annual review from previous years: 2023, 2022, 2021.

1. Most popular articles

This year’s most-read articles, by numbers of views:

1. The end of 0% interest rates: what the new normal means for software engineers. The end of 10+ years of 0% interest rates has changed the tech industry, but what do higher rates mean for software engineering jobs, developers, and careers; and how to prepare for it?

2. State of the software engineering job market in 2024. A deep dive into job market trends, the places hiring the most software engineers, growth areas, and more. Exclusive data and charts.

3. Scaling ChatGPT: Five Real-World Engineering Challenges. Just one year after its launch, ChatGPT had more than 100M weekly users. In order to meet explosive demand, the team at OpenAI overcame several scaling challenges. An exclusive deep dive.

4. Surprise uptick in software engineering recruitment. June and July are usually the quietest months for tech recruitment, but this year saw a spike in interest from recruiters in software engineers and EMs at that time. We dug into an unexpected, welcome trend

5. Building Bluesky: a Distributed Social Network. Bluesky is built by around 10 engineers, and has amassed 25 million users since publicly launching in February. A deep dive into novel design decisions, moving off AWS, and more.

My personal favorites:

1. The Trimodal Nature of Tech Compensation Revisited. Why can a similar position offer 2-4x more compensation in the same market? A closer look at the trimodal model I published in 2021. More data and new observations.

2. Inside Stripe’s Engineering Culture. Stripe is one of the world’s largest online payment companies. A deep dive into its engineering culture of operational excellence, API review, internal tools, and more.

3. What is Old is New Again. The past 18 months have seen major change reshape the tech industry. What does this mean for businesses, dev teams, and what will pragmatic software engineering approaches look like, in the future?

4. Measuring Developer Productivity: Real-World Examples. A deep dive into developer productivity metrics used by Google, LinkedIn, Peloton, Amplitude, Intercom, Notion, Postman, and 10 other tech companies.

5. What is Reliability Engineering? A history of SRE practice and where it is today, plus advice on working with reliability engineers, as a software engineer. A guest post by SRE expert and former Googler, Dave O’Connor

While I did not break them out individually, engineering culture deepdives bring deeply interesting details from startups, scaleups and Big Tech. This year, we shared more details on Shopify, Antithesis, Anthropic, Oxide, Bluesky and Stripe.

This year featured several guest articles from industry experts. If you have interesting experiences or stories to share, here are details on how to express interest.

2. Tech in 2024

We tracked the tech industry’s pulse closely, all year; here are some standout trends:

Focus on efficiency due to higher interest rates. This year’s mega trend was the final demise of zero percent interest rates, after more than a decade. In a higher interest rate environment, companies cut back on spending, investors allocate less to venture capital, and it’s harder for tech companies to raise funding.

As a result, there’s less hiring, some tech companies downsize, and the job market’s tougher for software engineers. The good news is that we saw this before during the Dotcom Bust and the global financial crisis; in both cases, things got better over time. We analyzed this mega trend and its implications.

GenAI frenzy. ChatGPT launched two years ago in November 2022, and in 2024 it continued to take the tech industry, and society at large, by storm. The end of zero interest rates meant that VC investment in tech dropped, but that was counterbalanced by the magnetic appeal of LLMs and AI.

This year, OpenAI raised a record-breaking $6.6B in funding (an all-time record that was broken just this week by Databricks raising $10B.) In 2024, the single best way to raise VC funding was to be an AI startup. Predictably, non-AI tech startups looking for the next round of funding are increasingly pivoting to AI because not doing so makes this harder.

LLMs to change software engineering. Has there ever been such rapid adoption of a new technology, as with GenAI coding tools? In our mid-2024 survey, more than 75% of engineers shared that they use GenAI tools for work. ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot each had more mentions than all other AI coding tools combined.

But dev tooling seems to be changing rapidly. Cursor, Windsurf, and Zed, are all new IDEs that are gaining momentum; and Cursor might have surpassed GitHub Copilot usage, at least for now. There’s also coding AI agents that are becoming the next wave of innovation, with a race between startups to build the first “hit” AI coding agent, with Cognition AI’s Devin the current frontrunner.

In five years’ time, most software engineers will use IDEs and dev tools that will be packed with GenAI-powered functionality. The race is on as to which tool that will be; meaning more innovation and experimentation to come. It’s rare to see so many startups having a shot at unseating the incumbent, Microsoft, which has an unfair distribution and pricing advantage, and will seek to protect market share in this key segment.

GenAI is impacting hiring. LLMs are clearly changing software engineering hiring, both in how hiring processes work, and in that junior engineering positions are harder to find. GenAI tools are frequently likened in effectiveness to an intern or junior engineer. With higher interest rates, less recruitment, and more senior engineers available for hire than before; most companies will likely opt to hire senior engineers who produce more with these GenAI tools.

I predict entry-level hiring will increase, but entry-level engineers will be expected to use GenAI coding tools, and get to the senior level faster than before. We analyzed more in How GenAI is reshaping tech hiring.

Some fundamentals will not change. GenAI has a speedy pace we’ve not seen in tech for decades. However, it’s not the first drastic change; industry legend Grady Booch recalled how in the 1970 and 80s, the shift from mainstream computers to distributed computing was similarly fundamental, with many “old school” mainframe programmers struggling to adapt. In our conversation with Grady, he sees GenAI as another tool that lowers the barrier for building software, but which doesn’t fundamentally change engineering practices or software architecture.

This year, the Pragmatic Engineer harked back to the dawn of software engineering with the 50-year-old classic engineering book, The Mythical Man Month. In half a century of computing plenty has changed, especially around developer productivity. But some things have not: estimating software projects remains challenging, prototyping is still a good way to start projects, and communication remains a massive challenge in large teams.

Software engineering will evolve with GenAI, but I don’t foresee the fundamentals of what makes a standout software engineer being turned upside down. I also expect more demand for standout engineers, not less.

3. Evolution of the Pragmatic Engineer newsletter

Just as the software engineering field is evolving, we also keep iterating and tweaking how to help you stay on top of this fast-moving field. Here are the biggest changes you might have noticed this year.

More “pragmatic” research. This year, we published more in-depth articles based on practical industry research than in any year before. I say “we” because this year Elin Nilsson joined the publication as Tech Industry Researcher. Like me, Elin is a software engineer; having spent seven years at Spotify in mobile and platform engineering teams.

Without Elin’s efforts, some popular deep dive articles might have not happened, including:

• How GenAI is reshaping tech hiring

• What GenZ devs really think

• How Bluesky was built and what the engineering culture is like

• AI tooling for software engineers: reality check

• Bug management that works

• Rolling out AI dev tooling, company-wide

• … and others

It’s great to have Elin on the team. With double the firepower on research, you can expect to see more of this kind of practical, and deeply interesting research and deepdives to come. You can also suggest to us interesting areas that could be worth researching.

The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast has been a major addition to our content output. Long-time readers may remember in-depth interviews, such as:

• Platform teams with Ganesh Srinivasan (then-Chief Product and Tech Officer of Confluent)

• Developer productivity with Adam Rogal (director of developer platform at DoorDash)

• Developer tools with Steve Yegge (then-head of engineering at Sourcegraph)

These interviews were a lot of fun to record, and I transcribed them into written articles. But I remember thinking it was a pity that people could hear the conversations, so I’d always had the idea that something like a podcast would be good. In the end, , who writes the excellent Lenny's Newsletter, gave me the final push to launch the Pragmatic Engineer podcast when we grabbed coffee in the Bay Area. Thank you!

In the short time since the pod started, it has hosted industry legend Grady Booch (co-creator of UML, a software architecture pioneer, and fellow at IBM), one of the best-known software engineers experimenting with GenAI, Simon Willison (co-creator of Django), Notion’s first native iOS and Android engineer, and many other interesting guests. See all episodes here.

Like the newsletter, the podcast focuses on software engineering at Big Tech, startups, and elsewhere. Every episode is full of pragmatic approaches for building stuff whether you’re a software engineer or a manager.

In 2025, guests will include (creator of extreme programming, and co-author of our Response to McKinsey) Dr. Nicole Forsgren (cofounder of DORA, lead author of Accelerate, co-author of SPACE), Charity Majors, software engineer, cartoonist, and musician Manu Cornet, the software engineer who wrote the most code at Meta for years, one of the first WhatsApp engineers, and other interesting techies.

In your podcast player, search for “The Pragmatic Engineer” and add it to your list to get episodes when they’re published.

The Pragmatic Engineer tracks the pulse of the tech industry, identifying trends early, months before major news outlets cover them, if they ever do. Examples include how GenAI is reshaping tech hiring, how some startups could be successfully challenging GitHub Copilot and Visual Studio Code, the split of remote software engineering jobs shrinking, longer hiring processes for engineering managers, and more.

Major news orgs don’t report many of the topics we cover – likely because they’re specific to software engineering – or they cover them months after this publication; for example, Business Insider reported on shrinking middle management a full 18 months after we first analyzed the trend.

4. The Software Engineer’s Guidebook

I published The Software Engineer’s Guidebook a year ago, after four years of writing it. Originally, I hoped to publish with a well-known publishing house. However, my pitch was rejected by two tech book publishers, and significant edits were requested by a third, which I believed would “dumb down” the book, by adding features like “word of the day” and examples involving Alice and Bob.

I decided to write the book according to my original plan, and self-publish it. I did not share this at the time, but deep down I was concerned: what if the publishers were right, and there was no demand for this type of book? It’s more of a reference book than one to be read in one go, cover to cover. It’s intended to serve as a way to help “debug” your career, topic by topic; be it figuring out how to improve at software architecture, or hitting the next career level at a scaleup or Big Tech.

In the end, demand was far higher than I anticipated. Just over 33,000 copies were sold in the first 12 months. A detailed breakdown:

• 87% print sales (around 29,000)

• 13% e-books (circa 4,500)

Where most people bought the e-book:

• Kindle (55%)

• From my online store, DRM-free (40%)

• Apple iBooks (3%)

• Google Play (1%)

• Kobo (1%)

I was pleasantly surprised to see direct purchases so high, compared to Kindle. This is especially true as Amazon takes 65% of the book purchase price, thanks to its monopolistic pricing practices.

Countries with the most purchases, in order: US, Germany, UK, India, Canada, Spain, Netherlands, Poland, Australia, France, Italy, Japan, Sweden. These are all the countries that Amazon supports on-demand printing. Sadly the print book only ships from these Amazon marketplaces. This is one downside of self-publishing!

Translations are published, with more to come. The book has been published in German and Korean. Translations currently being prepared include Japanese, Chinese (traditional and simplified), Mongolian, and Hungarian.

For the Korean translation, the publisher worked with five prominent Korean engineers and CTOs on an additional section with a local perspective and additional practical insights for career growth.

Getting feedback from first-time readers is very rewarding. Yes, it’s nice for the book to be a commercial success, mostly thanks to the economics of self-publishing, but the best thing is that engineers still find it helpful, years after the observations and advice were written. I’ve gotten messages from engineers who managed to speed up their career growth, and managers who helped their team develop professionally.

Here’s one reader’s messages sent in August:

“This May, I bought the Software Engineer's Guidebook on Amazon and read it as fast as I can. But it is not possible to read this book fast - because it is packed with so many useful insights and actionable advice.

I wanted to thank you for this book. It is the best general engineering book on tech that I've read for a long time. I took advice outlined in getting things done, being visible and starting a work log of the things that I did.

Just recently, I was promoted to a senior position!”

The audiobook is out now on all platforms, except Audible. I submitted the book to Audible at the same time as everywhere else, so as and when Audible approves the book, it will be available there, too. Until then, you can get it everywhere else.

Thank you

Writing The Pragmatic Engineer – and now, hosting the eponymous podcast – is the most rewarding thing I’ve done in my career. Thanks so much for making this possible by reading the articles and getting involved in the conversations.

We’re taking a break until the start of January, and I hope you get to kick back this holiday season. If you’re due to be on call over Christmas and the new year, fingers crossed that it’s a quiet shift!

Season’s greetings and a Happy New Year; we’ll be back with renewed energy in 2025!

If you’re not a subscriber, here are recent issues you missed:

• Performance calibrations at tech companies: Part 1 and Part 2. Lifting the lid on calibrations in Big Tech: the politics, strategies, allies.

• The hiring market, as seen by hiring managers. Insights from 30+ engineering managers, directors, CTOs and founders about what’s happening on the job market.

Subscribe to get weekly issues. Many subscribers expense this newsletter to their learning and development budget. If you have such a budget, here’s an email you could send to your manager.👇

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The launch issue of The Pragmatic Engineer was published in the fall of 2021, meaning 2022 has been the first, full calendar year of the newsletter: thank you for being a reader! This year saw an incredible 100 issues published – and this one is number 101. You received them in your inbox every Tuesday and on most Thursdays – and occasionally, a bonus article on Wednesdays, too.

All together, these newsletters add up to about 5-7 books’ worth of information; more than half a million words (550,000 to be more exact.) For comparison, the average length of a nonfiction book is 80,000 - 110,000 words.

Today’s issue points to a selection of articles on trending topics which you may want to read again, or discover for the first time. We’ll cover:

1. Most popular articles, and my personal picks. 11 articles I personally recommend, which stand out in what’s been a busy year.

2. The Scoops of the year. This year, I kept my ear to the ground and brought you tech insiders’ takes and analysis in The Scoop, a news series based on a wealth of conversations with software engineers and engineering managers, who were sources in these reports. A recap of the events and trends we covered during 2022 – some of them long before major media outlets began paying attention.

3. Reading and listening for the holidays. Book and podcast recommendations.

4. Resources and templates for engineering managers and software engineers. This exclusive library of resources and templates kept growing this year. A summary of the new additions.

5. All Pragmatic Engineer articles. A browsable version of every single article published during 2022, focused on career growth and education, plus every older article since the start of the publication.

1. Most popular articles, and my personal picks

No less than 100 articles were published this year. Here’s the five most popular during 2022: 

1. Inside the longest Atlassian outage of all time. Hundreds of companies had no access to JIRA for two weeks, and Atlassian dropped the ball on communicating with them. My reporting seemed to trigger a response by the company, whose CTO acknowledged the problems and pledged to do better. The episode contained plenty of lessons for any tech company on how to respond when serious outages occur.

2. The State of Frontend in 2022. Analysis of ‘The State of Frontend’ survey, that drew 3,700 responses. Which engineering practices and technologies are gaining momentum?

3. Real-World Engineering Challenges #7: Choosing Technologies. Selecting frameworks, languages and architecture approaches at Trello, Birdie, MetalBear and Motive.

4. Shipping to Production. Approaches for shipping code to production reliably, every time.

5. The Tech Boom is Over (The Scoop #11.) Layoffs, rescinded offers, hiring freezes, hiring slowdowns and a realistic look at the market. This article from May captured the onset of one of this year’s biggest, most consequential, trends.

My personal picks from this year are these six articles:

1. Migrations done well. Migration is an under-appreciated area in software engineering, yet it is a surprisingly common challenge at fast-growing companies. Invest in learning how to do them well – you’ll be thankful later. Related to this is the article, Real-World Engineering Challenges issue on Migrations.

2. Inside Facebook’s Engineering Culture. This two-part series is the lengthiest and most in-depth issue to date about how a Big Tech company works, from the perspective of software engineers and engineering managers. It’s a deep dive into the company’s vocabulary, hiring approach, career ladders and engineering processes, with advice on how to succeed at Meta. A notable mention also for Inside Amazon’s engineering culture.

3. Profit centers vs cost centers at tech companies. The difference between them, why they matter for your career growth, and how to determine which one you work in.

4. Hiring software engineers and Hiring junior software engineers. Recruitment has been a big topic all year, and these two issues might be helpful – even for experienced hiring managers.

5. Healthy oncall practices and Oncall compensation. Being oncall is a practice many software engineers are all too familiar with, as it’s very common both at Big Tech and startups. This article digs into how smaller companies are innovating more healthy oncall practices than most of Big Tech – and they also tend to compensate oncall better than the tech giants, too.

6. Measuring software engineering productivity and how Uber is doing it and how LinkedIn does it. This year, we’ve covered how to measure the productivity of software engineers – and how not to do it. I suspect this is a topic we’ll hear more about in 2023, if budgets get even tighter at some companies.

2. The Scoops of the year

The Scoop launched as a regular series in 2022. Most Thursdays, I bring you interesting events, trends and patterns I detect, based on conversations with software engineers and engineering managers. Many scoops come from people proactively contacting me and I treat these sources as confidential and anonymous by default.

The Scoop is my way of “keeping my ear on the ground” and sharing with you what’s going on inside tech businesses, as it happens. This means The Scoop reported some potentially industry-wide shifts in their very early stages, during 2022.

For the second year in a row, the mainstream media regularly confirmed what I observed and reported, months after it was covered in The Scoop. For example, at the end of October, I gathered enough evidence to make the call that a Big Tech hiring slowdown was starting, which has had industry-wide implications, including new grads having a harder time getting a foothold in the industry, especially Big Tech. The New York Times confirmed this observation six weeks later, reporting that Computer science students face a shrinking Big Tech Market.

This was similar to what happened during the fall of 2021, when I covered The perfect storm causing an insane hiring market. Six months later, the New York Times covered the same topic.

During 2022, I covered the following trends in The Scoop:

• A chilling and boiling hiring market in February. This was a strange month, when much of the market was very hot, but layoffs had already begun at companies like Peloton and Hopin. I was unsure what to make of this blend of contrasting forces.

• The start of the Great Reshuffle? By March, unease was spreading in Big Tech about the size and composition of compensation packages, and I expected more people to switch jobs. Back then, it was still an employee’s market, as private companies like Cruise were introducing programs to buy secondary shares.

• Fast unexpectedly goes bankrupt. In an exclusive in early April, I brought you details about what happened inside the company which had raised $100M just a year earlier. But the business failed to raise its next round of funding. At the time, Fast looked like it could be an isolated case. But it turned out to be a canary in the coalmine: VC funding was drying up, fast.

• A tech market slowdown looking likely. In late April I was wondering if late-stage companies like Stripe, Klarna and Databricks were overvalued. Sure enough, by the end of 2022, all have cut their former valuations, and Databricks did so recently. I wrote that I expected layoffs to conserve cash; sadly, this prediction came true.

• The tech boom is over in May. A stream of hiring freezes or layoffs started at places like Meta, Wayfair, Redfin and Bolt. Later, all these companies did layoffs and rescinded offers.

• The crypto bust in June. Coinbase, Gemini, Crypto.com, BlockFi, Bitso and BitMex announced layoffs and it seemed like a golden age for Crypto was rapidly ending. Looking back, it certainly was.

• The start of a tech winter? in July. Most of Big Tech froze hiring and Apple joined this group.

• Return to the office at Apple in September. Apple became the first major Big Tech to mandate that employees return to the office for 3 days per week, and it seems it suffered no major attrition as a result. Perhaps because by this time, the Big Tech hiring market was cool enough. By December, I saw enough signs to state that we’re seeing an RTO wave, across the industry, especially at larger companies.

• Meta’s historic growth challenge in October. A month before Meta announced its historic first layoffs, I analyzed why the company faced a bigger growth challenge than ever before. Talking with engineering managers and directors, most were hopeful Meta would avoid layoffs, but everyone was clear the decision rested with Zuck. In November, Meta let go 13% of staff.

• Cruel changes at Twitter early November. As the market was cooling across Big Tech, Elon Musk bought Twitter. Almost overnight, the then richest man in the world turned the workplace into a theater of cruelty; the most toxic environment in Big Tech, especially for software engineers. Week after week, Musk enforced unnecessarily cruel methods like firing people then calling them back the next day, giving employees 24 hours to return to the office, and firing a software engineer in public on Twitter who had corrected him, then mocking those who’d just lost their jobs. Even now, when most tech workers are off for two weeks, Twitter employees are expected to work through the holidays.

• Companies still hiring and “The Good Scoop,” mid-November. To counterbalance the volume of negative news this year, I started to seek out positive stories, the ones that rarely get told. This is how I came to cover a Staff+ peer group success story at MongoDB, the Product roadmap for GitPod and the success story of Monta, an EV charging software management startup.

• Closing the year with hiring market observations from hiring managers and recruiters.

These 12 trends articles are just a selection of the 40 issues of The Scoop published this year. Browse them all here.

Thank you for all the tips you’ve sent in! If you hear something that’s relevant to software engineers and engineering managers, please send me a message. You can use various channels, including Signal. All messages are confidential. Also: I love getting the ‘good scoop!’

3. Reading and listening for the holidays

If you’re looking for books to read during the holidays, check out Pragmatic Engineer’s Holiday tech and business book recommendations. I’ve added a few new titles to this list.

During 2022, I went on two podcasts and addressed one conference. These were:

• The Changelog. In what’s fast becoming a tradition, I went on the Changelog during fall season. This year, we discussed the changing hiring market.

• Lenny’s Podcast. Lenny Rachitsky is a former product manager at Airbnb who writes the #1 business newsletter on Substack and started a podcast on product management. During a podcast episode, we ended up discussing how I write The Pragmatic Engineer and I compared notes with Lenny.

• LeadDev conference. This year, I gave a talk at LeadDev Berlin, titled Developer productivity 2.0. All the videos from the conference are available to watch, once you register to LeadDev, for free.

4. Resources and templates for engineering managers and software engineers

One perk which full subscribers to the Pragmatic Engineer get is access to a wealth of resources for engineering managers and software engineers. These are valuable documents, templates and checklists related to hiring, onboarding, and career progression. This year, I added plenty of new ones:

• Oncall compensation data.

• Preparing for layoffs: a checklist.

• End-of-year reflections: a guide.

• Writing goals & accountability template.

• Uber’s engineering metrics dashboard.

• A migration checklist to plan and validate migrations.

Hiring:

• Software engineer interview process: an overview.

• Scorecard template for the coding interview.

• Debrief summary: an example document to prepare ahead of debriefs.

• These are additional to the existing documentation set on the engineering manager interview process.

Performance reviews:

• Preparing for promotions: a checklist.

• Work Log for recording your activities.

• Self-review for performance reviews. An example.

• Numbers in self-reviews for software engineers. Inspiration you can use.

View all resources and templates

5. All Pragmatic Engineer articles

With close to 150 articles published, it’s becoming tricky to keep track of them all. To make browsing this collection easier, I’ve collated every single article published in 2022, as well as earlier ones.

See all articles here:

Browse the 2022 articles

Or browse all The Pragmatic Engineer articles:

Browse all articles

Wrapping up the year

Thank you for being a reader during 2022: I greatly appreciate your support. Without it, the Pragmatic Engineer could not exist in the way it does.

This year, the newsletter kept growing. In what was a somewhat unexpected development, the major news outlet Bloomberg noticed this newsletter, and recently published a profile of The Pragmatic Engineer and me.

Looking ahead to 2023, my main goal is to ensure you get interesting, relevant and actionable details and insights about software engineering, engineering management, career development, Big Tech, startups – and everything in between.

I continue to keep my ear to the ground, to report on the hottest topics in software engineering. Looking ahead, expect more articles on topics like security engineering, disciplines like developer advocacy, and technologies like machine learning. I’m also planning to delve into cases of engineering teams operating in “pragmatic” ways. 

As budgets shrink across tech, I’m also looking to widen the scope of these newsletters by covering how “non-high growth” startups do more with less, in addition to covering Big Tech and high-growth startups, as usual. 

What are the emerging trends and topics in software engineering or engineering management which you’d like to hear more about? Share your suggestions.

This is the final edition of the Pragmatic Engineer in 2022. The publication is going on a winter break, in line with the recently published vacation policy. Enjoy the rest of the year and I’ll see you next on Tuesday, 3 January, 2023!

See last year’s year in review here: The Pragmatic Engineer in 2021.

This has been quite the year for The Pragmatic Engineer. During the first six months, I published articles on The Pragmatic Engineer blog, experimented with a YouTube channel and published a few books. Then in late August, The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter launched and it really took off from there, making its way to the #1 paid technology newsletter on Substack.

The Pragmatic Engineer covers challenges at Big Tech and high-growth startups through the lens of engineering managers and senior engineers.

Subscribe to get weekly issues - if you’re not already. Many subscribers expense this newsletter to their learning and development budget.👇

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How it started

Back In January it was only a few months since I had left my engineering manager job at Uber after four years, where I had grown from senior engineer to engineering manager and a manager of managers.

My plan was to spend a few months writing books, then in the second part of the year to found a startup related to platform engineering or developer tools.

The first part of my plan worked better than anticipated. I wrote three books, although I have yet to finish The Software Engineer’s Guidebook, which I did intend to publish during 2021. 

Also, I didn’t found a startup. Instead, I kicked off The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter, writing a publication that I wish I’d had access to when I worked at Uber:

The response to the newsletter launch was more enthusiastic than I expected:

In only six weeks, the newsletter crossed 1,000 subscribers:

And as of today, close to 30,000 people are on the Pragmatic Engineer mailing list, and over 2,700 people pay for the weekly issues, plus the frequent bonus ones. The Pragmatic Engineer is today the #1 paid technology newsletter on Substack and one of the top Substacks globally, as the Substack team confirmed. This is incredible: thank you for your support!

Many people are expensing the newsletter, and several companies have signed up their engineering leadership team to a group subscription. Read details on expensing and group subscriptions.

When I started the newsletter, I was uncertain if this would or could be my main focus, in the long run. At the end of 2021, I’m a lot more clear about this. Yes, the newsletter is my main focus, along with activities to help make it even better in 2022.

I share below my plans for the newsletter next year. But first, a summary of standout posts from 2021.

Statistics

• 29 newsletter issues went out in the first four months of publication.

• 17 were weekly long-form articles: 4 of these were free articles, the other 13 🔒subscriber-only ones.

• 12 bonus issues that included hiring market insights, the first guest article, the launch of the Real-world Engineering Challenges series and the start of The Scoop series. 4 of these were free bonus issues, the 8 other ones 🔒subscriber-only ones.

• ~250 pages worth of reading, given the average length of each edition is around 5,000 words (or 10-12 pages for the longform articles, and half the length for bonus issues). That’s roughly a book and a half’s book’s worth of reading in just four months!

Highest-rated newsletter issues

At the bottom of every newsletter, I ask how you liked the issue. Here are the five you enjoyed the most this year:

• 🔒 Onboarding to a new company. What great onboarding processes look like and strategies to onboard efficiently, as an engineer or a manager.

• 🔒 The perfect storm causing an insane tech hiring market and More follow-up on the tech hiring market. The challenge of hiring was a recurring theme in 2021 and I wrote several pieces that dived deeper into what is happening, and why.

• 🔒 Growing a junior-heavy team. Approaches to leveling up team members, and the realities for teams with fewer experienced engineers.

• 🔒 The Platform and Program Split at Uber. The change that shaped the company’s engineering culture for years to come, and my take on Platform teams.

• 🔒 Finding the next company to work at. Strategies for finding your next job in tech, and where those great opportunities are. 

Most-read newsletter issues

The four most popular articles this year have been:

• How Big Tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum. A survey of how tech projects run across the industry which highlights Scrum being surprisingly absent at Big Tech companies.

• Incident review and postmortem best practices. A survey of how companies deal with incidents today, and a peek into the emerging best practices of the future.

• The seniority rollercoaster. Handling down-levelling when switching jobs, and getting ahead of it as an engineering manager.

• Hiring and retaining a diverse engineering team. Stories from six engineering leaders who succeeded in building and growing diverse teams.

Most-read blog posts

Before launching the newsletter in August, I published my long-form writing on The Pragmatic Engineer Blog. I still cross-post from it here, in the form of several free newsletter articles. The five most-read blog posts this year were:

• The trimodal nature of software engineering salaries. The biggest “splash” of the year, that resulted in many companies re-evaluating how they think about compensation, and even more engineers realizing there’s a “hidden range” of software engineering compensation, and then seeking it out at companies in the Tier 2 and Tier 3 ranges.

• What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers that traditional companies do not: the seven biggest differences.

• Equity 101 for software engineers at Big Tech and startups. Why equity is important, types of it, and what you should be aware when negotiating for it.

• Uber’s crazy YOLO app rewrite, from the front seat. The craziest project of my engineering career.

• The Pragmatic Engineer Test: 12 questions on engineering culture.

Most-watched YouTube videos

I started the Pragmatic Engineer YouTube channel in late 2020, and did a few videos during 2021, with the channel growing to 36,000 subscribers. Five popular videos from the past 12 months:

• Confessions from a Big Tech hiring manager: tips for software engineering interviews (365K views!)

• The trimodal nature of software engineering compensation: why positions pay a (very) different salary.

• Big Tech hiring is conservative - but why? Insights as a hiring manager.

• How to negotiate a Big Tech offer as a software engineer.

• Developing software engineers into leaders: my approach at Uber.

I’ve not created any videos since starting the newsletter, but I am planning to get back to YouTube and create videos at a less frequent cadence. However, my main focus will stay on the newsletter.

Other events in 2021

I published two books this spring, and made an update to my first published book:

• Building Mobile Apps at Scale: 39 engineering challenges.

• Growing as a Mobile Engineer: Reaching and breaking the mobile engineering glass ceiling.

• The Tech Resume Inside Out is free, going forward for anyone in software engineering who does not (yet) have a job.

Angel investing is something I’ve started to do, investing in over 10 companies. I became an advisor at mobile.dev, which has also been my single biggest angel investment as well. Our mission is to set a new standard for mobile development, which empowers all companies to deliver high-quality mobile applications to their users.

Plans for 2022

My main focus for next year is to make the newsletter even more relevant for engineering leaders. My vision is for the publication to help engineers and engineering managers become better leaders, build better products and businesses, and have a more fulfilling career.

I’d greatly appreciate your feedback - please share your thoughts and suggestions on the newsletter. Thank you! 🙌

Publishing The Software Engineer’s Guidebook is my other goal for the year. This is a book I’ve been writing for more than two years, and in 2022 I plan to finally finish writing and publish it! Many of the topics of the book – like growing as a software engineer – overlap with newsletter topics.

If you’d like to help shape the book, you absolutely can. Please answer these seven questions on your experience of being a software engineer.

I will also keep experimenting with other ways to add value to the newsletter - expect industry-wide insights, bonus columns, guest posts and other experiments next year!

Special thanks

Many people have helped the newsletter with feedback, advice, and reviews. Thank you to everyone!

Additional thanks to those who have helped review newsletter issues: Adriaan Bloem, Alessandro Bahgat, Alex Treppass, Alexandra Moraru, Arun Nagarajan, Andreas Thienemann, Barry Frost, Charles-Axel Dein, Chris Zehner, Curtis Einsmann, David Golden, David Hatanian, Ebi Atawodi, Emili Parreño, Evelina Vrabie, Jacek Migdal, James Stanier, Jean Hsu, João Alves, John Szumski, Karthik Hariharan, Luciano Holanda, Marco Melas, Max Ischenko, Michał Węgrzyn, Mustafa Ali, Nicky Wrightson, Pavel Tcholakov, Piotr Kafel, Ross McNairn, Rodrigo Pimentel, Sarmad Bokhari, Sophia Li, Steve Hill, Uma Chingunde, Viktor Vojnovski, Yahya Bayramoglu, Yohan Hartanto, Zeke Arany-Lucas and Zsombor Erdődy-Nagy. And to my editor, Dominic Gover!

🤔 Feedback on the newsletter

Please share your feedback on the newsletter. This will help make the publication even better in 2022.

Please consider sharing the newsletter with friends and colleagues, and subscribing, if you’ve not already.

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Thank you 🙌 - and Happy New Year!

- Gergely