THE PRAGMATIC ENGINEER
HTML [2025-12-18] The Pulse: Cloudflare’s latest outage proves dangers of global configuration changes (again)
Deja vu: a large Cloudflare outage caused by an instantly rolled-out global config change – two weeks after a similar problem
HTML [2025-12-13] The Pulse: Could a 5-day RTO be around the corner for Big Tech?
From next February, workers at Instagram must be in the office, five days a week. This makes Meta the second tech giant after Amazon to mandate a 5-day RTO. Will more big companies do the same?
HTML [2025-12-05] Downdetector and the real cost of no upstream dependencies
During the Cloudflare outage, Downdetector was also unavailable. I got details from the team about why they have a hard dependency on Cloudflare, and why that won’t change anytime soon.
HTML [2025-11-21] A startup in Mongolia translated my book
A 30-person startup called Nasha Tech translated The Software Engineer's Guidebook for the benefit of their company and the Mongolian tech ecosystem.
HTML [2025-11-20] The Pulse: Cloudflare takes down half the internet – but shares a great postmortem
A database permissions change ended up knocking Cloudflare’s proxy offline. Pinpointing the root cause was tricky – but Cloudflare shared a detailed postmortem. Also: announcing The Pragmatic Summit
HTML [2025-11-11] Four years on writing a tech book: pitching to a publisher
HTML [2025-11-06] The Pulse: Amazon layoffs – AI or economy to blame?
Amazon is doing more mass layoffs, claiming it wants to be more nimble. But are job losses really about US economic fears, and how Amazon’s retail business will be affected?
HTML [2025-10-30] Comparing interviews at 8 large tech companies
Puneet Patwari applied to 8 major tech companies, and received 6 offers. He compares his interview experiences at Meta, Amazon, Uber, and 5 other workplaces
HTML [2025-10-30] New trend: programming by kicking off parallel AI agents
More devs are experimenting with kicking off coding agents in parallel
HTML [2025-10-23] What caused the large AWS outage?
On Monday, a major AWS outage hit thousands of sites & apps, and even a Premier League soccer game. An overview of what caused this high-profile, global outage
HTML [2025-08-21] Creative ways to fund open source projects
“Open source maintenance fee” trialed by Wix Toolset, while the creator of uv offers paid, enterprise-only features for larger companies.
HTML [2025-08-14] New trend: extreme hours at AI startups
Pulling 80+ hour work weeks – including weekends – is becoming the norm across AI startups, and is unlikely to stop while AI is so hot.
HTML [2025-07-24] Cursor makes developers less effective?
A study into the workflows of experienced developers found that devs who use Cursor for bugfixes are around 19% slower than devs who use no AI tools at all. One possible takeaway is that AI tools can ...
HTML [2025-07-17] The Pulse: Section 174 is reversed! Mostly, that is
Finally, relief: tax regulation hurting the US tech industry is striked off for good - for the most part, that is.
HTML [2025-07-05] Software engineering with LLMs in 2025: temperature check