The Pragmatic Engineer

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

A very similar automatic systemd update on Ubuntu 22.04 caused the biggest-ever Datadog outage in March 2023. In June 2025 it caused the biggest-ever Heroku outage. Deja vu... More in today's deepdive: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-reliabil…

We ran a survey with 3,000 respondents, mostly software engineers. Here are the most-mentioned AI tools. Devs heavily use GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT and Cursor. More details in the monthly free deepdive: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pragmati…

Well, this was a wild story. This engineer (Soham Parekh) 1. Had an impressive, but fabricated resume 2. Told companies that he will receiving O1-visa in weeks (false) 3. Aced all interviews: coding, trial days etc. Founders speak highly of his tech skills. (cont'd)

How common is it to need to traverse trees, as a dev? If you work at @cursor_ai, it could be more common than usual. Here's how Cursor keeps their code index up-to-date (so it can search code without storing source code in its database). Full: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/cursor

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-imag…

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-rob…

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

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-hiring-…

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

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-reality-…

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. They are building amazing things. A deepdive... into reality: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-engineeri…

We are aiming 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/gToLb9yGepdzj5…

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

Tech compensation is trimodal: meaning a software eng can make 2-4x the compensation, depending on what company they work at. Today, we validate this theory with more data points than ever: 20,000+, coming from @Levelsfyi. You don't want to miss this: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/trimodal

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 @Levelsfyi: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/trimodal