The Pragmatic Engineer

Software engineering at Google & CS education with Titus Winters

31K views · 2d ago · 1:41:18

Guest: Titus Winters

An engineer who helped create today’s software engineering curriculum now says to burn down almost all of it. What’s the cause of this contradiction? We find out from the lead author of Software Engineering at Google. Titus Winters spent more than a decade at Google, where he led its readability program and built Abseil, Google’s open-sourced foundational C++ libraries.

Topics: Getting hired by Google · Finding his niche at Google · Why Google made testing mandatory · Why new engineers fear making mistakes · Abseil: C++ foundations at Google · Google’s massive C++ refactoring

The revised rules of engineering management with Will Larson

241K views · 1w ago · 1:56:28

Guest: Will Larson

What’s changed in “the unwritten rules” of engineering management since the 2010s, what drove the shift to today, and what has it done to the engineer-to-CTO career path? Today’s guest is one of the best people I know who can tackle these questions.

Topics: Stories from Yahoo! · Digg’s v4 rewrite: the insider story · Will’s path to eng leadership · Uber, Stripe, Carta, and Calm · What does a CTO do? · Will’s role at Imprint

Uber’s AI infra, from the inside

178K views · 2w ago · 1:34:18

What do developer tools look like inside of Uber, today? They are very different from what you would see at most places. For example, can you guess what service a system called DevPods, Code Inbox, Slate or Wisdom would be providing to engineers?

Topics: Uday’s early days at Uber · Uber’s move to microservices · Uber’s engineering team, then and now · Developer tooling before AI · DevPods · Building for AI agents

Building resilient systems with Sam Newman

170K views · 3w ago · 1:59:05

Guest: Sam Newman

Sam Newman wrote one of the most-read books about microservices (“Building Microservices”), but he calls them an architecture of “last resort.” In this episode of the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, Sam explains his thinking on this, and he’s certainly well placed to do so; he was in the room when the term “microservices” was coined.

Topics: Sam’s path into tech · Thoughtworks · The rise of microservices · Are specs becoming more important than code? · Building Resilient Distributed Systems (Sam’s new book) · Three rules of distributed systems

The state of the tech industry in 2026 - LDX3 New York

300K views · 3w ago · 29:39

A look into what has changed, what’s still the same – and what’s broken – in the tech industry, with a focus on AI labs, startups and Big Tech. The keynote presentation on 15 September 2026, at LDX3, in New York. Related The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives

Topics: What changed · What's not changed · What broke · What’s next

Distributed databases with Peter Mattis

189K views · 1mo ago · 1:42:32

Guest: Peter Mattis

How is it that a software veteran who regularly shipped 100K of database-grade code to production each year, pre-AI, feels like he’s even more productive today, with no drop in quality? Peter Mattis is co-founder and CTO of Cockroach Labs, and an original creator of GIMP. He also worked on Gmail and distributed storage at Google.

Topics: Peter’s path into tech · Building GIMP · Working on Gmail at Google · Google’s infra: google3, build files, Bazel, and Colossus · Distributed storage bottlenecks · Latency, throughput, and availability

Design Engineering with Maggie Appleton

197K views · 1mo ago · 1:28:32

Guest: Maggie Appleton

What can everyone else learn from designers and design engineers? As it turns out, there’s plenty, as I discovered when one of the best design engineers in the industry, Maggie Appleton, came onto the Pragmatic Engineer Podcast. She’s a staff research engineer at GitHub Next, where she builds prototypes to explore how software engineers might collaborate with AI in new ways.

Topics: From anthropology to tech · What does a designer do? · How Maggie works · The case for planning with physical tools · Why Maggie is learning woodworking · Design engineers and engineering constraints