PragmaticEngineer.com is the blog of Gergely Orosz, a software engineer and engineering manager known for clear, research-driven writing about the software industry. He publishes deep-dive essays on software engineering, architecture, scaling systems, engineering management, Big Tech practices, incident analysis, product delivery, and developer careers. Gergely combines experience from companies like Uber and Microsoft with interviews, data, and real examples from engineering teams around the world. His work is widely read because it explains how high-performing tech organizations actually operate, and what individual developers can learn from them. The blog is complemented by a popular weekly newsletter and books focused on practical engineering leadership.
21 articles from this blog
Analysis of rising demand for Forward Deployed Engineers at Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, with simplified hiring and outsourced deployment.
Google Cloud accidentally deletes Australian fund UniSuper's infrastructure, causing two-week outage; third-party backup prevents total data loss.
Analysis of Anthropic's Claude Code capacity issues and their impact on developer relations.
TechPays, a European tech salary site, is acquired by Levels.fyi to improve pay transparency for software engineers.
Analysis of GitHub's recent reliability issues including data integrity bugs and outages, questioning why other vendors aren't similarly affected.
Analysis of rising token costs in AI coding tools at tech companies, with insights from engineers on budget impacts and potential solutions.
Meta employees engaged in 'tokenmaxxing'—competing on an internal leaderboard for AI token usage, leading to waste and outages until the board was removed.
Analysis of GitHub's reliability issues amid AI-native development surge, comparing with new startup Pierre Computer.
Analysis of why the FDE (Founding Developer Experience) role is becoming less desirable despite high demand, based on engineer feedback.
Cloudflare rewrites Next.js using AI in a week, challenging Vercel's ecosystem and raising questions about open source defensibility.
A software engineer describes replacing a $120/year SaaS tool with a custom LLM-generated solution in just 20 minutes, questioning the future of simple SaaS.
Analysis of Cloudflare's repeated outages caused by global configuration changes, highlighting risks and impact on reliability.
Analysis of Cloudflare's major outage that took down sites like ChatGPT and X, and their transparent postmortem report.
An experienced engineer shares lessons from writing and self-publishing a bestselling tech book after a 4-year journey, including pitching to publishers.
Analysis of Amazon's recent 14,000 layoffs, exploring whether AI or economic factors are the primary cause behind the job cuts.
A Principal Engineer compares interview processes at 8 major tech firms, detailing coding, system design, and behavioral rounds.
Analysis of the large AWS outage caused by a DynamoDB DNS failure, examining the technical details and impact on global services.
Explores creative funding models for open source projects, including the Open Source Maintenance Fee, to ensure sustainability.
A study reveals AI tools like Cursor may slow developers down by 19%, despite their perception of increased productivity.
Analysis of the US Section 174 tax change reversal and its impact on software engineer hiring and the tech industry.
