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The Pragmatic Engineer. @pragmaticengineer.com · 2d

What caused the AWS outage that felt like it took down half the internet on Monday?

It started with a race condition in DynamoDB's DNS propagation, which ended up setting the dynamod.us-east-1.amazonaws.com DNS to empty.

A deepdive and more details: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/aws-outage-u...

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The Pragmatic Engineer. @pragmaticengineer.com · Sep 23

How does the Claude Code team build Claude code? Today's deepdive covers this.

An interesting take from them: "Mockups feel like a thing of the past when you can build 5-10 working prototypes per day."

The full article: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-claude...

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The Pragmatic Engineer. @pragmaticengineer.com · Sep 16

How do tech companies measure the impact of AI on software dev? Here's how GitHub, Google, Dropbox, Microsoft, Monzo, Atlassian, Adyen, Booking and Grammarly do it:

More details on 9 other companies+trends in today's deepdive w @lauratacho.com at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-tech-c...

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The Pragmatic Engineer. @pragmaticengineer.com · Sep 9

With the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) role trending in discussions, here's our deepdive from a month ago in @pragmaticengineer.com on the origins of the role, how it looks at Palantir, OpenAI and Ramp, and why the role is so hot *now*:

newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/forward-de...

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The Pragmatic Engineer. @pragmaticengineer.com · Sep 2

State of the software engineering job market in 2025: Big Tech has started to hire more software engineers.

Also: tenure at Big Tech has dramatically increased since the 2023 layoffs (surprising!)

A lot more details in today's deepdive: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/state-of-t...

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The Pragmatic Engineer. @pragmaticengineer.com · Aug 19

Interesting findings in The Pragmatic Engineer 2025 Survey:

- JIRA: the single-most mentioned tool.. mentioned more than any language/IDE/other

- Even though the survey was taken by developers, Figma is more used than Kubernetes or Cursor (!)

Full: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pragma...

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The Pragmatic Engineer. @pragmaticengineer.com · Jul 29

How do you build a great SDK?

@quentin.pradet.me has been building and maintaining SDKs for a decade. In today's deepdive he walks through the most common approaches in the industry.

Surprise: LLMs not a great fit for this kind of work!

Full: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/building-g...

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The Pragmatic Engineer. @pragmaticengineer.com · May 13

OpenAI's biggest-ever launch happened on 25 March: releasing ChatGPT Images.

100M new users in the first week
700M images generated in 7 days
1M new users/hour signing up at peek

The eng team told us how exactly they pulled it off. All the details: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/chatgpt-im...

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The Pragmatic Engineer. @pragmaticengineer.com · Apr 29

What is it like to build humanoid robots, as a software engineer? Today's deepdive goes into the software side of this industry-but before we do, we need to talk about hardware. With Sandor Felber, formerly Humanoid Robot Learning Researcher at MIT:

newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/humanoid-r...

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The Pragmatic Engineer. @pragmaticengineer.com · Apr 22

The Pragmatic Engineer crossed one million subscribers!

This is an improbable milestone. Today's deepdive covers the history behind it, who reads the publication, why it might be so popular, and what's next: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/one-million

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The Pragmatic Engineer. @pragmaticengineer.com · Apr 15

Tech interviews feel like they are at inflection point: a lot of approaches and interview types that worked fine until now seem to be breaking down.

Could we be heading back to pre-pandemic hiring practices? Today's deepdive: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/tech-hirin...

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The Pragmatic Engineer. @pragmaticengineer.com · Apr 8

What is the MCP Protocol, and why is it spreading so rapidly across IDEs, with all major ones having added support (Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code, Zed, Cline and Neovim)?

Today's deepdive goes into just this: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/mcp

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The Pragmatic Engineer. @pragmaticengineer.com · Apr 1

Today's free deepdive is about the reality of tech interviews (and tech interviewing) in 2025. By Evan King and Stefan Mai (formerly at Meta, currently cofounders at Hello Interview, and getting a good pulse of the current market thanks to this):

newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-realit...

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The Pragmatic Engineer. @pragmaticengineer.com · Mar 26

Have you been hearing how "AI will replace software engineers"? Is it true?

We talked with software engineers who not only are not "replaced" but picked up a new skillset working with LLMs. Building amazing things.

A deepdive... into reality: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-enginee...

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The Pragmatic Engineer. @pragmaticengineer.com · Mar 18

We want to capture an accurate snapshot of software engineering, today – and need your help! Tell us about your tech stack and get early access to the final report, plus extra analysis

Please help out by taking this 5-15 minute survey:

forms.gle/hoK7TtaH1hx3...

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The Pragmatic Engineer. @pragmaticengineer.com · Mar 11

Imagine interviewing a candidate who looks like a very strong coder. Almost extending an offer. But turns out, the candidate is a deepfake.

This actually happened with a startup called Vidoc Security - twice!

Deepdive with all the details: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-fakers

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The Pragmatic Engineer. @pragmaticengineer.com · Mar 4

Today's deepdive looks at 20,000+ data points to understand compensation ranges for software engineers in the US, UK and India.

Here are details for India - the first time this data is ever published. Data courtesy of Levels.fyi

See all data: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/trimodal

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The Pragmatic Engineer. @pragmaticengineer.com · Feb 25

Today's deepdive: Robotics for software engineers. A deepdive with Sandor Felber, Humanoid Robot Learning Researcher at MIT.

A walk through on how a typical enough robotics projects goes from planning, through development to shipping.

Read it here:

newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/robotics

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The Pragmatic Engineer. @pragmaticengineer.com · Jan 27

Exciting announcement: paid The Pragmatic Engineer subscribers now have access to:

- 12 months of Perplexity Pro ($200 in value)

- 3 months of Kagi Ultimate with ($75 in value)

Read more about details, and how to claim these: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/free-kagi-...

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The Pragmatic Engineer. @pragmaticengineer.com · Jan 14

A mental model on the differences between native mobile, React Native and Flutter. More in today's deepdive that is a broad overview of cross-platform mobile development trends and technologies:

newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/cross-plat...

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The Pragmatic Engineer. @pragmaticengineer.com · Jan 5

How AI-assisted coding will change software engineering: hard truths. About how these AI tools really work and how they could be the start of the return of software, as a craft.

Based on a guest post by @addyosmani.bsky.social. Read it here: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-ai-wil...

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The Pragmatic Engineer. @pragmaticengineer.com · Dec 17

How Shopify built their innovative 3D Live Globe in 2024.

Tech stack: React + R3F, some Rails, Go, Flink+Kafka

Details on how the team went from idea, through design, to shipping and oncall: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/shopify-bl...

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The Pragmatic Engineer. @pragmaticengineer.com · Dec 3

Today's deepdive: How GenAI tools are reshaping software engineering recruitment.

An interesting find: cover letters are practically dead (90%+ of them are AI-generated, according to hiring managers we spoke to.)

More: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-genai-...

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The Pragmatic Engineer. @pragmaticengineer.com · Nov 29

A roundup of deepdives brought to you by The Pragmatic Engineer the last 12 months.

Including industry trends, real-world engineering challenges, engineering culture deepdives, and more.

Also: we have a Black Friday deal!

See it here: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-pragmati...

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The Pragmatic Engineer. @pragmaticengineer.com · Nov 26

Interesting: following a survey on social media asking software engineers what their favorite IDE is: the #1 mention was an upstart, Cursor.

More details about this survey about the most popular IDEs with GenAI capabilities in today's deepdive:

newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ide-that-s...

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