The Pragmatic Engineer 五周年：从博客到工程深度报道与播客

I checked the calendar and it is indeed half a decade – almost to the day in 2021 – since I published the first-ever issue of The Pragmatic Engineer:

But the numbers aren’t the most validating thing for me; that would be the feedback sent in by readers. Via email, in DMs, or in-person at events, it’s great to hear how an article or a podcast we published helped someone try a new approach, or to gain confidence that theirs was the right one, or that an article helped convince a team to change things. It also means a lot to learn that The Pragmatic Engineer helps people feel more confident about keeping up in this fast-changing industry.

Thanks again for your support! It’s the reason why The Pragmatic Engineer is a viable business and a growing publication, and means we can “scale up” our coverage to deliver ever-more detail about how software gets built, today.

Today’s issue covers:

1. Diving deeper, year after year

The Pragmatic Engineer was 15 years in the making and not an overnight success; I started to write a blog in 2007 about software development, which was “rebooted” as “The Pragmatic Engineer Blog” in 2015. At the time, it was read by almost nobody!

2021: product-market fit

The Pragmatic Engineer started off with one in-depth article on an interesting topic per week, including these ones:

The Platform and Program Split at Uber: platform teams were starting to go “mainstream” across the industry; How Big Tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum: this article made a splash; The perfect storm causing an insane tech hiring market: the job market in late 2021 was one of the hottest ever seen; Growing a junior-heavy team: this was published when it was hard to hire seniors and many teams were junior-heavy

2022: ‘The Pulse’ is born

In the second year, I added a Thursday article called ‘The Scoop’ – now ‘The Pulse’ – alongside the research-heavy Tuesday articles. Unlike those articles, The Scoop covered tech news and developments on a weekly basis and wasn’t ‘evergreen’ material. But as I talked with more techies, I got to spot new trends and patterns, often months before mainstream publications covered them.

Recent examples have included us reporting the odd tokenmaxxing trend a month before the Financial Times did so, or covering the extreme work patterns at AI startups months before The Wall Street Journal picked up the story, or The Economist republishing my Trimodal Nature of Software Engineering Compensation diagram four months later across their digital and print editions.

2023: Going direct for engineering deepdives

Until mid-2023, I mostly wrote deepdives on engineering topics without the involvement of companies that weren’t interested in showing me how they did things from the inside.

At the end of 2022, I heard from former colleagues at Uber that the ridesharing giant was moving off its own data centers, and moving onto the cloud, and onboarding to GCP and Oracle. I gathered plenty of details from current and ex-Uber workers, but the infra leadership didn’t engage with me via official channels.

So, I went ahead and published ‘Inside Uber’s move to the Cloud’, which got the majority of details right, except for a few. Inside Uber, the article was criticized for not getting everything correct, but that would’ve involved me talking on the record to Uber’s infra leadership, which they didn’t do!

Inside OpenAI: how does ChatGPT ship so quickly?; Building Meta’s Threads app; Inside Stripe’s engineering culture; Inside Figma’s engineering culture

Since then, deepdives about interesting, cutting-edge tech companies have become a regular part of our publishing schedule. And as a bonus, we’ve figured out a “recipe” for getting access to folks at tech companies who are usually off-limits to the media, which leads to more exclusive content for readers.

2024: The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast

In the fall of 2024, I launched The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast with two intentions:

Share previously “private” conversations. When doing a deepdive about an interesting company or technology, I usually did a call with engineers. These fascinating, one-hour-long conversations got summarized in a paragraph or two in articles, but I always felt there was more that readers would be interested in; Meet interesting people. I was spending most of my days behind a keyboard writing deepdives, with the occasional video call when researching engineering teams. I hoped that doing a podcast would just allow me to meet more people!

Simon Willison, one of the most grounded voices in AI engineering, was the first podcast guest, and feedback was warm and positive. I always look forward to talking with guests due to their experience and significant industry contributions; the likes of Grady Booch, Nicole Forsgren, and Mitchell Hashimoto – or for their unusually deep expertise – like context engineering with Dex Horthy, developer productivity with Laura Tacho, and building software without looking at the code with Peter Steinberger. These days, when I go to a conference, more people talk to me about the podcast than the written articles, which is interesting.

Over time, I’ve developed a preference for in-person podcast conversations instead of video calls. When the podcast launched, I had a home studio set up for the remote recording of on-screen meetings:

But you might have noticed that these days, podcast episodes are in-person conversations more often than they are video calls. I find that conversation flows better in person, and that the format is more engaging for everyone involved than a conversation on a screen is. It also offers an opportunity to hang out before and after the recording! Of course, the logistics of in-person recording are more complicated due to travel, and when there’s someone I’d really like to get on the show but it’s tricky to arrange, we stick with the remote option.

I’d like to hear your suggestions about future guests for the podcast. Let us know who you’d like to hear from and why. Send suggestions here.

2025: The Pragmatic Engineer Summit

In summer 2025, I attended the LeadDev Conference in London and enjoyed it so much that I asked if we could organize a conference for The Pragmatic Engineer, with deepdives and podcast guests for readers and listeners.

We spent the second half of last year organizing the first-ever Pragmatic Summit, which took place in February this year in San Francisco, with great help from the excellent Statsig team (many of whom now work at OpenAI). With 500 attendees, 15 standout speakers – and with it being the first-ever conference I’d organized – it was a smashing success. A one-minute video recap of the event:

Based on the feedback from attendees, there will be another Pragmatic Summit in San Francisco next year. I’ll share details in the coming weeks; we’re in the middle of putting this event together now!

2026: Growing the team in order to dive deeper

Predictably, the most time-consuming task in The Pragmatic Engineer is working on deepdives. We often spend up to two months on a single deepdive, educating ourselves on the topic being covered, talking with expert engineers, and generally getting deep into a topic in order to deliver a deepdive worth reading.

I say “us” because this year, Jessica Salmon and Ivan Klaric joined the team. Both are software engineers with startup and Big Tech experience, who enjoy spending time getting to understand topics and contributing to longform articles.

2. What’s next?

With a larger team than before, we’ve continued to produce deepdives for readers. A few recent ones:

Why Ramp built its own in-house coding agent, Inspect; Software engineering at a proprietary trading company: Optiver; How building software is changing at Anthropic; State of the software engineering job market in 2026

I’ve found there are no shortcuts for producing an in-depth article on a relevant topic for readers. You simply have to put the time and effort into it. This involves spending a lot of time on thinking and understanding things, going directly to engineers who build what we want to learn about, and then spending even more time on organizing research material into a lengthy article that’s informative and hopefully not dull to read.

Needless to say, we’ve experimented with the analytical powers of AI tools in parts of the research process. The technology is good at gathering publicly-available sources and does a decent job of summarizing them, but that’s been more or less the limits of AI’s usefulness for our purposes to date – except as a spelling and grammar checking tool after a full draft is written by a person.

If anything, AI can easily lead you down the wrong track by theorizing about non-existent connections and confidently espousing theories which some basic critical thinking could easily debunk!

Aside from research and correcting (most) typos, we don’t use AI in this publication. That’s because we are writing for a readership of humans and believe in the value of human voices. What you read, hear, and see in The Pragmatic Engineer comes from me and other engineers, and plenty of thought goes into each sentence.

What comes next?

As a company that doesn’t have any venture funding, we can be ambitious without chasing any “growth goals.” In the near future, our goal is to keep doing what we do, and do it better. This means:

A big theme for the rest of 2026 is how software engineering is changing: tools used for decades like IDEs are falling out of style, and processes long considered as best practices, like code reviews, are becoming optional. Of course, the biggest change is that we’re spending little to no time on typing out the code, which has never been the case since computing existed. Even before computer keyboards, programmers were writing programs on punch cards!

The good news is that we see that fundamentals still matter: many software engineers who were considered standout devs before seem to be even more in demand than ever, while picking up AI engineering appears to be easier than learning a new programming language.

Nonetheless, this change is destabilizing, fast-paced, and no one has figured out the “right” way to build software with AI. We’ll keep reporting on cases of teams and individuals that adapt well, while also paying attention to those things that don’t change, such as how teams, as a “core” unit of a business, seem to be just as important at leading AI labs as they were pre-AI.

3. How software engineering is changing: essay challenge

To finish, we’re delighted to announce an essay challenge on the prescient topic of how software engineering is changing for professionals.

As mentioned, the pace of change in software engineering is only accelerating, with rapid industry-wide adoption of LLMs, AI tooling, and AI infrastructure. At The Pragmatic Engineer, we aim to cover much of what’s going on, and as part of that, we’d love to pull in more perspectives than what our team can cover alone.

Send us an article no more than 10,000 words long on how you see things changing at your startup or tech company. We’ll award $10,000 for the best essay we read, and other leading entries can win smaller prizes. Articles sent to us will be eligible for publication in future editions of the Pragmatic Engineer. See more details here.

So, tell us what’s new, different, better, or worse in your part of the tech industry since AI has been in your workflow.

Submissions close 4 October at midnight (PST). Read all details of the challenge here, and we look forward to reading your article about interesting and consequential changes in your part of the industry.

If you’re thinking of upgrading to the paid version, you can do so for the “launch” price, with a 33% discount on annual plans. This offer ends in a week, on 8 September. Get it here. If you have an L&D budget to expense from, here’s an email template to send to your manager.

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Thank you for being a reader of The Pragmatic Engineer; we value your attention and support, and never take it for granted. With that, onwards to the next five, exciting years!