The Pragmatic Engineer Engineering Blog

15 articles on EngBrief

The Pragmatic Engineer by Gergely Orosz covers the inner workings of Big Tech and high-growth startups. Articles dive into engineering management, system design, compensation, hiring practices, and industry trends — offering a behind-the-scenes look at how top engineering organizations operate.

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Latest Articles

The Pragmatic Engineer1 min read15d ago

The Pulse: Cloudflare rewrites Next.js as AI rewrites commercial open source

An engineer at Cloudflare rewrote most of Vercel’s Next.js in one week with AI agents. It looks like a sign of how AI will disrupt existing moats and business...

CloudAI

The Pragmatic Engineer1 min readJan 29, 2026

I replaced a $120/year micro-SaaS in 20 minutes with LLM-generated code

I used to pay $120/year for a SaaS that hasn’t added new features in four years, and didn’t fix its broken billing system for three years. Using an LLM, I...

PaymentsAI

The Pragmatic Engineer1 min readJan 7, 2026

The grief when AI writes most of the code

When AI writes almost all code, what happens to software engineering? There is grief involved for us developers, that's for sure.

The Pragmatic Engineer1 min readDec 18, 2025

The Pulse: Cloudflare’s latest outage proves dangers of global configuration changes (again)

Deja vu: a large Cloudflare outage caused by an instantly rolled-out global config change – two weeks after a similar problem

Cloud

The Pragmatic Engineer1 min readDec 13, 2025

The Pulse: Could a 5-day RTO be around the corner for Big Tech?

From next February, workers at Instagram must be in the office, five days a week. This makes Meta the second tech giant after Amazon to mandate a 5-day RTO....

The Pragmatic Engineer1 min readDec 5, 2025

Downdetector and the real cost of no upstream dependencies

During the Cloudflare outage, Downdetector was also unavailable. I got details from the team about why they have a hard dependency on Cloudflare, and why that...

Cloud

The Pragmatic Engineer1 min readNov 21, 2025

A startup in Mongolia translated my book

A 30-person startup called Nasha Tech translated The Software Engineer's Guidebook for the benefit of their company and the Mongolian tech ecosystem.

The Pragmatic Engineer1 min readNov 20, 2025

The Pulse: Cloudflare takes down half the internet – but shares a great postmortem

A database permissions change ended up knocking Cloudflare’s proxy offline. Pinpointing the root cause was tricky – but Cloudflare shared a detailed...

CloudDatabases

The Pragmatic Engineer1 min readNov 11, 2025

Four years on writing a tech book: pitching to a publisher

In 2019, I decided to write a book about software engineering. As an experienced software engineer and manager, I had the topic clear in my head, and assumed...

The Pragmatic Engineer1 min readNov 6, 2025

The Pulse: Amazon layoffs – AI or economy to blame?

Amazon is doing more mass layoffs, claiming it wants to be more nimble. But are job losses really about US economic fears, and how Amazon’s retail business...

The Pragmatic Engineer1 min readOct 30, 2025

Comparing interviews at 8 large tech companies

Puneet Patwari applied to 8 major tech companies, and received 6 offers. He compares his interview experiences at Meta, Amazon, Uber, and 5 other workplaces

The Pragmatic Engineer1 min readOct 30, 2025

New trend: programming by kicking off parallel AI agents

More devs are experimenting with kicking off coding agents in parallel

The Pragmatic Engineer1 min readOct 23, 2025

What caused the large AWS outage?

On Monday, a major AWS outage hit thousands of sites & apps, and even a Premier League soccer game. An overview of what caused this high-profile, global outage

Cloud

The Pragmatic Engineer1 min readAug 21, 2025

Creative ways to fund open source projects

“Open source maintenance fee” trialed by Wix Toolset, while the creator of uv offers paid, enterprise-only features for larger companies.

The Pragmatic Engineer1 min readAug 14, 2025

New trend: extreme hours at AI startups

Pulling 80+ hour work weeks – including weekends – is becoming the norm across AI startups, and is unlikely to stop while AI is so hot.