Gergely Orosz

@gergely.pragmaticengineer.com

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Writing pragmaticengineer.com and engguidebook.com. Formerly at Uber & Skype.

Send me DMs: pragmaticurl.com/contact
Tech talent collective & job board: pragmaticurl.com/talent

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History doesn't repeat: but sometimes it rhymes. An example of building a social network from the ground up, with a small team: now (Bluesky), and a decade ago (Instagram).

I gave this year's annual talk at Craft Conference. It's my best attempt to pinpoint what caused sudden changes across the tech industry, and how the software engineering industry will change as a result. You can watch the full talk + Q&A: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/what-is-ol...

I was wondering why Rust is so popular for systems programming these days. This quote from @steveklabnik.com , formerly on the Rust Core team (now at Oxide) offers a pointer: "Rust brings a 2010s-era development experience to a space that is pretty solidly stuck on the 70s and 80s."

How do AI coding agents work? SWE-bench has become the industry standard AI coding agent benchmark. The team behind SWE-bench built SWE-agent (at release, state-of-the-art open source AI agent.) With SWE-agent developer Ofir Press, we dive deep: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-coding-...

How do AI software engineering agents work?newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com Coding agents are the latest promising Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool, and an impressive step up from LLMs. This article is a deep dive into them, with the creators of SWE-bench and SWE-agent.

The workflow of GitHub Copilot Workspace. It's developer-driven, AI-assisted. It gets around the biggest limitations of LLMs: hallucination. I expect more AI coding tools to copy this approach. More in this week's The Pulse: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-92

This was just 2 months ago. In a testament to how Big Tech can now execute *faster* than startups, Microsoft already launched the product many AI dev tools startups are aiming to build (a "better Copilot") It's GitHub Copilot Workspaces. GitHub's execution speed is unrivaled.

I see tech companies going public; raising late-stage rounds; early-stage rounds; eye-popping rounds. All this week. Nice to see all of this. Congrats to everyone who put in the hard work and hit a big milestone. And to everyone else working on getting there: keep it up!

"What if we forget to add very broad noncompetes to their contracts, and our employees leave for a competitor?" "What if we do: and when they try to leave, we block this. They stay because we forced them to: demotivated, angry, frustrated and bitter towards their employer - us?"

Huge news for anyone working in tech in the US. Noncompetes are now banned: not just in California (like before), but nationwide. Very, very relevant for anyone at Amazon (which is the Big Tech that has enforced noncompetes even for low-level engineering positions).

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Gergely Orosz

had a great time chatting with @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com & @hejelin.bsky.social, looking back at the last couple years!

Ever wondered how Bluesky was built? With @hejelin.bsky.social , we spent the last couple of weeks talking with @pfrazee.com, @dholms.xyz (two "founding" engineers) to get a sense of how this platform went from zero to where it is today. Read it here: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/bluesky

Love the Bluesky dev team. About to publish a deepdive on how Bluesky was built. As we talked with @pfrazee.com and @dholms.xyz, Daniel shared a story about a weird snake dream. We decided to include it in the draft. I expected he'll ask to remove it. But no: So, soon, the "snake dream" is coming!

When talking with efficient engineering teams (ones building stuff quickly or at large scale) I don't really hear much mentioned about working with large teams (most don't do it). I do hear the concept of "DRI" (directly responsible individual) almost always come up though.

This is what "open sourcing our social network" looks like. The below is the Bluesky protocol repository. You can see all source code changes, CI/CD runs. It's refreshing to see there are now "proper" open source social networks like this! See it here: github.com/bluesky-soci...

I wrote about how Meta shipped Threads in ~6 months, reaching 100M users on the first week. It was impressive. But there's a lot of backwind there of course (Instagram!) What I find just as impressive: Bluesky. ~10 engineers. 5 million users in about a year from launch, 2 years from devs start.

Heard Postgres referred as the "Swiss Army Knife for databases" and... ... yeah, that sounds accurate! (I am not sure who made it first, but a fitting observation!)

I'm in the last phase of writing up research we did with @hejelin.bsky.social on Bluesky. One thing I am only realizing now: Bluesky is one of the very few social media companies that is NOT a for-profit (Mastodon perhaps the other?) This is a massive, massive difference - and advantage.

Got to talk with @pfrazee.com and @dholms.xyz about how Bluesky is built and... WOW. I didn't realize how small the team is; the practical engineering choices made; and how interesting the protocol and choices around it are. More details coming soon!

It's that day of the year: Cyber Monday. And The Pragmatic Engineer is 20% off for the first year. What people say: shoutout.io/GergelyOrosz/ All articles: pragmaticurl.com/all-newslett... The code: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe?co...

What are some good / fun / interesting gift ideas for someone working in tech? Suggestions welcome!

If you know what this is: you know how it all started.

Imagine a world where the Linux dev community and Linus Torvalds did not create Git in 2005 (or later). What would the "mainstream" version control system be today? CVS? SVN? TFS? Perforce? Mercurial? Just as interesting: why did Git become the de facto version control tool?

Behind The Software Engineer’s Guidebook there are so many people who directly - and, often indirectly, perhaps not even knowing! - helped in what the book would become. Lots of people I learned from/with. And more than 20 early readers, plus my editor. The acknowledgements page:

OpenAI is fascinating, and especially the ChatGPT group within the company. It feels like they execute faster than what should be possible. But how do they do it? I talked w Evan Morikawa, who has been there from day one & shared some great stuff: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/inside-ope...

An interesting generational and industry divide: Those who previously worked with SDETs in the past (or were one) and those who don't know what this term means.

Spent the past few weeks talking with engineering at OpenAI to figure how it is that they ship SO fast with ChatGPT that it’s hard to just keep up! When they have more than 100M monthly users. Fascinating details not revealed before coming next week in newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/about

A small downside of self-publishing on Amazon as an author: you cannot order advance copies! I was the very first person to place a bulk order for The Software Engineer’s Guidebook on Saturday and after multiple delays, I now have my copies: So good to see the final book:

Some of the best things happened after turning a setback into motivation. Four years ago a publisher I really, really hoped I could work with rejected the pitch for The Software Engineer's Guidebook. They were nice and professional, but it stung. I decided to just work harder and more on the book!

WOW. The Software Engineer’s Guidebook is the 15th most sold book on Amazon Australia, 18th in Germany, 75th in the UK. It was the 38th most sold in the US… before Amazon stopped taking orders. Amazon prints this book via KDP and probably got too many orders. Thank you for the trust!!

Four years in the making and finally released today: The Software Engineer's Guidebook is out!! Get it on Amazon or via engguidebook.com @whereistanya.bsky.social described it like this: "This book is well named: it really does feel like the missing guidebook for the whole industry."