The Pragmatic Engineer

“The Pragmatic Engineer” delves into the intricacies of architecting enterprise-level solutions with a focus on knowledge base infrastructure, generative AI, and data augmentation for machine learning. It explores the challenges of moving beyond static data libraries to interact with living data, emphasizing the importance of understanding over mere indexing. The document discusses the implementation of secure semantic memory layers, multi-tenant pipelines, and the utilization of advanced technologies like Spark, EMR, and Airflow to build fault-tolerant and responsive systems. Additionally, it addresses the significance of context, precision in search mechanisms, and the role of vector embeddings in enhancing semantic understanding.

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The Pragmatic Summit 2027

The Summit is back in San Francisco, for the second year, and registrations are open for February 10, 2027

Scaling Slack and GitHub with Maude Lemaire

The Pragmatic Engineer

Maude Lemaire shares lessons from scaling Slack and GitHub, improving performance at Cursor, and using AI while keeping engineering judgment in human hands.

How software engineering is changing: a tale of two eras

The Pragmatic Engineer

We invited readers to write about how building software changed, in an essay challenge. Many of you took part, and today we’re sharing the winning piece from a strong set of entries

The Pulse: Anthropic kills the coding interview

The Pragmatic Engineer

AI is rendering the Leetcode-style interview pointless and now Anthropic has deleted it from its interview loop. Also: details of incident.io’s AI spend, Microsoft’s exit offer to engineers, and more

Software engineering at Google & CS education with Titus Winters

The Pragmatic Engineer

Titus Winters shares lessons from engineering at Google’s scale and explores how AI is reshaping developer productivity and computer science education.

AI SRE: what is it, how could it change on-call – and does it work?

The Pragmatic Engineer

“AI SRE” is fast becoming a trending term fueled by flashy demos from vendors, but has an AI SRE ever really been on-call while engineers slept? Deepdive

The Pulse: Time to rethink software security because of AI?

The Pragmatic Engineer

A month’s worth of security breaches in a single day – will things get worse before they improve? Also: Anthropic accused of version control “rip off”, and more

The revised rules of engineering management with Will Larson

The Pragmatic Engineer

Will Larson, CTO of Imprint, explores how AI and shifting industry expectations are changing engineering management, career ladders, and the path from engineer to CTO.

What’s the ROI of software engineers’ spending on AI?

The Pragmatic Engineer

AI spending has greatly increased at most companies this year, but has it actually changed shipping velocity and PR output? We analyse data from 27 companies – with some interesting findings

The Pulse: OpenAI software engineer accused of spying

The Pragmatic Engineer

Also: insider details on how and why Anthropic moved off Git, a new trend of AI-assisted coding rounds inside of Big Tech, and more

Uber’s AI infra, from the inside

The Pragmatic Engineer

Uber Distinguished Engineer Uday Kiran Medisetty shares how Uber builds internal developer tools, integrates AI agents into engineering workflows, and measures their impact on productivity.

Building resilient AI-powered software, and planning for when things go wrong

The Pragmatic Engineer

How to handle uncertainty with AI vendors and disaster recovery (DR) approaches to consider. An excerpt from the book Building Resilient Distributed Systems by Sam Newman