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gergely.pragmaticengineer.com
Writing The Pragmatic Engineer (@pragmaticengineer.com), the #1 technology newsletter on Substack. Author of The Software Engineer's Guidebook (engguidebook.com). Formerly at Uber, Skype, Skyscanner. More at pragmaticengineer.com
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What capacity planning looks like when your service is at a massive scales: at the point where peak load can overload ISPs in your region (eg in certain cities!) From Ashutosh Agrawal who architected the live-streaming service that broke the world record in 2023 (at 32M concurrent live streams)

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

Been a while since I wrote more complex SQL statements using eg JOIN, GROUP BY, HAVING statements all in one. I know how to do it, just a bit rusty. Incredible how LLMs "come to the rescue" to help get through the rustiness and help with a first draft (oftentimes works perfect)

submitted 1 day ago • 10 comments

How do you deploy code to a ship or a submarine in the US Navy? @nicolefv.bsky.social (creator of DORA, co-creator of SPACE, lead author of the book Accelerate) has first-hand experience with what it actually means. Fascinating. Full episode: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wufj...

submitted 1 day ago • 3 comments

One of the biggest mind-bends is this: Atlassian, the creator of JIRA, founded 23 years ago is NOT profitable. This is despite generating $4.6B in revenue (!!) Linear, founded in 2019, building “the modern JIRA for startups/scaleups” IS profitable. Make it make sense

submitted 2 days ago • 19 comments

Software engineer job postings are at a 5-year low, as per data from Indeed (which is a pretty good data source). But how bad are things, really? I looked closer and found that it's... probably not as bad as circulated on social media (cont'd) Also: no, it's not the end of software engineering...

submitted 2 days ago • 10 comments

Perfect example of a company wanting to piss off its paying customers. Either don’t offer phone support, or charge for it. But if you offer it, do it well. HP cannot make up its mind so opted for offering terrible phone support, misleading customers as it does.

submitted 3 days ago • 12 comments

Easiest way to sell a SaaS product: - Generate $$$ by spending $ on it - Save $$$ by spending $ on it (e.g. by saving time, complexity etc) - Do something for $ that will generate $$$ in revenue or save $$$ in revenue Happens to be the easiest way to sell an AI product as well!

submitted 3 days ago • 2 comments

One impact of AI coding tools is how they will make “technologies preferred by LLMs” dominant even more. “Build me a mobile app” is much easier to have an LLM do it using React Native or Flutter than native iOS or native Android. So most AI-scaffolded apps will be this!

submitted 3 days ago • 5 comments

Nicole Forsgren (@nicolefv.bsky.social) is the brains behind DORA, lead author SPACE, and the co-author of Accelerate. Hardly a better person to share how to think about, measure and improve developer productivity! Stream the full episode: • YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wufj... (cont'd)

submitted 4 days ago • 2 comments

Klarna was the company that went all-on replacing customer support with an AI bot and went on to brag about the cost savings. Now they are reversing course. Easy to see more companies blindly replacing quality customer support with a worse AI implementation will follow...

submitted 4 days ago • 11 comments

To understand how live streaming works, understand HLS (HTTP Live Streaming.) A summary from Ashutosh Agrawal who architected a live streaming system serving 32M concurrent streams at peak:

submitted 5 days ago • 2 comments

Most common tech stacks at early-stage, VC-funded startups in the US. This is how Coastal Recruitment sees tech stacks shared by startups. They are a recruitment co working w 100+ startups per year to place engineers from the first to ~no. 20. More: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/startup-ma...

submitted 5 days ago • 9 comments

I am getting increasingly frustrated for services I pay for: which simply removed the way to contact support with a non-trivial problem. They added an AI bot. Which bot is sh*t and cannot fix my issue. All these companies patting themselves on the back while I plan to leave

submitted 5 days ago • 14 comments

Talking with a major executive recruiter (Riviera Partners) about interesting changes they are seeing in recruitment demand: "We are seeing a strong increase in *startups* executing VP of AI searches" If someone has seen a VP of AI or hired one: what do they do? 😅

submitted 5 days ago • 11 comments