pragmatic-engineer

<p><em>Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover Big Tech and startups through the lens of senior engineers and engineering leaders. Today, we cover one out of five topics from </em><a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-forward-deployed-engineering?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com" rel="noreferrer"><em><u>last week&#x2019;s The Pulse</u></em></a><em> issue. Full subscribers received the article below seven days ago. If you&#x2019;ve been forwarded this email, you can</em><a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/about?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com"><em> <u>subscribe here</u></em></a><em>.</em></p><p>Last August, we covered a sudden trend of&#xA0;<a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/forward-deployed-engineers?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com">high demand</a>&#xA0;for forward deployed engineers (FDEs), and now there are signs demand is increasing more.</p><h3 id="google-fde-recrui…

<p><em>A $124B fund in Australia would have lost all data stored with Google Cloud, had they not relied on a third-party backup. A rare blunder from GCP, where regional replication did not stop the deletion &#x2013; and a just as rare statement from Google Cloud&#x2019;s CEO taking the blame.</em></p><p><em>The below is an excerpt from </em><a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-93?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com" rel="noreferrer"><em>The Pulse #93: OpenAI makes Google dance</em></a><em>, originally published on 16 May, 2024. I am republishing it because on 20 May 2026 Google Cloud has done it again: they took offline cloud infra provider Railway by </em><a href="https://x.com/Railway/status/2056873075401007338?s=20&amp;ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com" rel="noreferrer"><em>blocking Railway&apos;s Google Cloud account</em></a><em>. The below is a warning: if you are on GCP, have a plan B, should GCP delete your account and data, or block your account.</em></p><p>Fol…

<p><em>Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover Big Tech and startups through the lens of senior engineers and engineering leaders. Today, we cover one out of five topics from </em><a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-did-capacity-shortages?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com" rel="noreferrer"><em><u>last week&#x2019;s The Pulse</u></em></a><em> issue. Full subscribers received the article below seven days ago. If you&#x2019;ve been forwarded this email, you can</em><a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/about?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com"><em> <u>subscribe here</u></em></a><em>.</em></p><p>Last week, we reported on Anthropic <a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/i/196004322/2-anthropics-speed-run-to-break-peoples-goodwill?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">seemingly being on a speed run</a> to break devs&#x2019; goodwill by silently &#x201C;ner…

<p><em>tl;dr:</em><a href="https://techpays.com/?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com"><em> <u>TechPays</u></em></a><em> is joining</em><a href="https://www.levels.fyi/?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com"><em> <u>Levels.fyi</u></em></a><em>: so the leading tech salary site in Europe gets the love and care it deserves. Thanks to</em><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/rzsombor/?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com"><em> <u>Zsombor</u></em></a><em> for building this project with me for so many years.</em></p><p>Pay transparency has always been an issue in tech, <em>especially</em> in Europe. For a while, I assumed that the most that a senior+ software engineer could make in London or Amsterdam would be in the realm of &#xA3;100K / &#x20AC;100K. Once you reach that level, you&apos;ve made it. You&#x2019;re now at the very top of the market! <em>Or are you?</em></p><p>So when I was making &#xA3;93K in London, working as a principal engineer at Skyscanner in 2016, I was not expecting that I could be comp…

<p><em>Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover Big Tech and startups through the lens of senior engineers and engineering leaders. Today, we cover one out of four topics from </em><a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-github-breaks?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow"><em>last week&#x2019;s The Pulse</em></a><em> issue. Full subscribers received the article below seven days ago. If you&#x2019;ve been forwarded this email, you can</em><a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/about?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow"><em> subscribe here</em></a><em>.</em></p><p>GitHub&#x2019;s reliability has been beyond unacceptable recently: last month, third party measurements pinned it at <a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/i/192229275/1-does-github-still-merit-top-git-platform-for-ai-native-development-status?ref=blog.pragmatic…

<p><em>Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover Big Tech and startups through the lens of senior engineers and engineering leaders. Today, we cover one out of three topics from </em><a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-ai-token-spending-out-of?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow"><em>last week&#x2019;s The Pulse</em></a><em> issue. Full subscribers received the article below seven days ago. If you&#x2019;ve been forwarded this email, you can</em><a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/about?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow"><em> subscribe here</em></a><em>.</em></p><p>Last week, we covered <a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-tokenmaxxing-as-a-weird?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">the slightly perverse trend of &#x201C;tokenmaxxing&#x201D;</a> across the industry, w…

<p><em>Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover Big Tech and startups through the lens of senior engineers and engineering leaders. Today, we cover one out of four topics from </em><a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-tokenmaxxing-as-a-weird?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow"><em>last week&#x2019;s The Pulse</em></a><em> issue. Full subscribers received the article below seven days ago. If you&#x2019;ve been forwarded this email, you can</em><a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/about?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow"><em> subscribe here</em></a><em>.</em></p><p>Inside Meta, an engineer created a &#x201C;token leaderboard&#x201D; that ranks employees by token usage. Last week, The Information <a href="https://www.theinformation.com/articles/meta-employees-vie-ai-token-legend-status?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com" rel="no…

<p><em>Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover Big Tech and startups through the lens of senior engineers and engineering leaders. Today, we cover one out of four topics from </em><a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-is-github-still-best-for?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow"><em>last week&#x2019;s The Pulse</em></a><em> issue. Full subscribers received the article below eight days ago. If you&#x2019;ve been forwarded this email, you can</em><a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/about?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow"><em> subscribe here</em></a><em>.</em></p><p>We&#x2019;re used to highly reliable systems which target four-nines of availability (99.99%, meaning about 52 minutes of downtime per year), and for it to be embarrassing to barely hit three nines (around 9 hours of downtime per year.) And yet, in the past mont…

<p><em>Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover Big Tech and startups through the lens of senior engineers and engineering leaders. Today, we cover one out of four topics from </em><a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-is-the-fde-role-becoming?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow"><em>last week&#x2019;s The Pulse</em></a><em> issue. Full subscribers received the article below seven days ago. If you&#x2019;ve been forwarded this email, you can</em><a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/about?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow"><em> subscribe here</em></a><em>.</em></p><p>An interesting trend highlighted <a href="https://www.wsj.com/cio-journal/the-hottest-job-in-tech-isnt-very-glamorous-dc29ab3e?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">by The Wall Street Journal</a>: companies want to hire for FDE roles…

<p><em>Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the </em><a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/about?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com" rel="noreferrer"><em>Pragmatic Engineer</em></a><em>. This issue is the </em><a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-164-nextjs?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com" rel="noreferrer"><em>entire The Pulse issue</em></a><em> from the past week, which paying subscribers received seven days ago. This piece generated </em><a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-164-nextjs/comments?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com" rel="noreferrer"><em>quite a few comments across subscribers</em></a><em>, and so I&apos;m sharing it more broadly, especially as it raises questions on what is defensible and what is not with open source.</em></p><p><em>If you&#x2019;ve been forwarded this email, you can</em><a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/about?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com"><em> <u>subscribe here</u></em></a…

<p>I have been sceptical of the manifold claims that software-as-a-service (SaaS) will be killed by LLMs. The theory behind this idea is:</p><ol><li>SaaS is a pure software product. People who pay SaaS vendors do so because it&#x2019;s cheaper to buy this software than build it.</li><li>LLMs dramatically reduce the time and cost of building custom software.</li><li>Therefore, most SaaS vendors will go out of business because most companies/teams will prompt an LLM to write the software they need, such as for ticketing, meetings, customer relationship management, etc.</li></ol><p>The reason for my scepticism has been that SaaS such as HR software Workday is&#xA0;<em>more</em>&#xA0;than just software. Workday, for example, keeps up with compliance requirements (e.g., for holiday pay in different countries), guarantees correctness (e.g., payslips that comply with local regulations), and over time the software keeps up to date with changes in the external and internal environments.</p><p><…

<p>I&#x2019;m coming to terms with the high probability that AI will write most of&#xA0;<em>my</em>&#xA0;code which I ship to prod, going forward. It already does it faster, and with similar results to if I&#x2019;d typed it out. For languages/frameworks I&#x2019;m less familiar with, it does a better job than me.</p><p>It feels like something valuable is being taken away, and suddenly. It took a&#xA0;<em>lot</em>&#xA0;of effort to get good at coding and to learn how to write code that works, to read and understand complex code, and to debug and fix when code doesn&#x2019;t work as it should. I still remember how daunting my first &#x201C;real&#x201D; programming class was at university (learning C), how lost I felt on my first job with a complex codebase, and how it took years of practice, learning from other devs, books, and blogs, to get better at the craft. Once you&#x2019;re pretty good, you have something that&#x2019;s valuable and easy to validate by writing code that works!</p>…

<p><em>Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover Big Tech and startups through the lens of senior engineers and engineering leaders. Today, we cover one out of four topics from </em><a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-156?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com" rel="noreferrer"><em><u>last week&#x2019;s The Pulse</u></em></a><em> issue. Full subscribers received the below article seven days ago. If you&#x2019;ve been forwarded this email, you can</em><a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/about?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com"><em> <u>subscribe here</u></em></a><em>.</em></p><p>A mere two weeks after <a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-154?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Cloudflare suffered a major outage</a> and took down half the internet, the same thing has happened again. Last Friday, 5th December, thousands of sites went down or …

<p><em>Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover Big Tech and startups through the lens of senior engineers and engineering leaders. Today, we cover one out of four topics from </em><a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-155?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow"><em>last week&#x2019;s The Pulse</em></a><em> issue. Full subscribers received the below article seven days ago. To get articles like this in your inbox, every week, </em><a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/about?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow"><em>subscribe here</em></a><em>.</em></p><hr><p>A year ago, Amazon became the first tech giant to bring staff back into the office for the full five days per week. Back then, I&#xA0;<a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/i/149104874/what-does-amazons-day-rto-mean-for-tech?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com">analyzed</…

<p><em>The below is one out of five topics from </em><a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-154?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com" rel="noreferrer"><em>The Pulse #154.</em></a><em> Full subscribers received the below article two weeks ago. To get articles like this in your inbox, every week, </em><a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/about?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com"><em><u>subscribe here</u></em></a><em>.</em></p><p><em>Many subscribers expense The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter to their learning and development budget. If you have such a budget, here&#x2019;s</em><a href="https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/request-to-expense-the-pragmatic-engineer-newsletter/"><em><u> an email you could send to your manager</u></em></a><em>.</em></p><hr><p>One amusing detail of the <a href="https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-154?ref=blog.pragmaticengineer.com" rel="noreferrer">November 2025 Cloudflare outage</a> is that the realtime outage and moni…