The Pragmatic Engineer

Thank you for reading The Pragmatic Engineer this year. Here's a wrap up of year, and what we saw across the tech industry: https://lnkd.in/dVnigxcM

How did Shopify build this cool and fun "spaceship" to visualize Black Friday traffic? The team behind it - led by Daniel Beauchamp - shared it all: Here are all the details, from the idea and the first design concepts, through building the architecture of the service (React + R3F, Go, Rails, Flink+Kafka) to how it was deployed, oncall handled, and stats it showed during peak traffic. See it in today's deepdive: https://lnkd.in/eX9Jy8xS

What a story: how Bill Gates offered Microsoft's Chief Architect position to Grady Booch, and what happened next: From The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast. The full episode has many more gems: YouTube: https://lnkd.in/eF_u9jtv Spotify: https://lnkd.in/e3wzqk9E Apple: https://lnkd.in/emwSYgWR Web and transcript: https://lnkd.in/eJRTrCMr

There is certain irony that the same tech companies encouraging (or even mandating) devs to use LLMs at work oftentimes ban LLMs to be used on interviews. The good news: Some companies are integrating GenAI into their interview process, to assess candidates with these tools used. The bad news: we're starting to see evidence that allowing entry-level devs to use LLMs makes it a lot harder to assess their skills. As the same questions that experienced devs can tackle (e.g. correcting the output of an LLM, reasoning about the code, or diving into theory): they don't (yet) have the knowledge of.

Today's deepdive: How GenAI tools are reshaping software engineering recruitment. An interesting find: cover letters are practically dead, or will be: 90%+ of them are AI-generated, according to hiring managers we spoke to. Also, smaller companies seem to be adapting much faster, and integrating GenAI tools into their hiring processes. Full issue with more findings: https://lnkd.in/eqKFUwmX

A roundup of deepdives brought to you by The Pragmatic Engineer the last 12 months. Also: we have a Black Friday deal! Articles published this year include ones on: - Software engineering industry trends - Real-world engineering challenges - Engineering culture deepdives - Software engineering approach deepdives - Career and compensation - "Industry pulse" coverage ... and more! See all the articles, as well as the Black Friday deal here: https://lnkd.in/ecDprR9m

Interesting: following a survey on social media asking software engineers what their favorite IDE is: the #1 mention was an upstart, Cursor. More details about this survey about the most popular IDEs with GenAI capabilities in today's deepdive: https://lnkd.in/eTkAPMXQ

What is a "DST" and why should anyone building large and complex systems care? Today's deepdive goes into how to debug large, distributed systems: We cover what a DST is, and how such a tool is built by Antithesis, what the tech stack is, and why the team is building a new database (!) that has no unit or other "classical" tests (!!!) Read it here: https://lnkd.in/eqD_z9w2

Today is the day when we talk about politics. Not *that* politics... but the other kind! A guest post by Cindy Sridharan about how to be a more efficient software engineer at a mid-sized or large company. Read it here: https://lnkd.in/e_EPfX7x

Where are some of the hottest AI companies hiring software engineers from? Here's some data from this week's The Pragmatic Engineer deepdive: Data from Live Data Technologies, based on tracking job movements of tech professionals between companies. See the full report here: https://lnkd.in/eAh24zb4