Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 6,087 posts.
See a shorter, and updated version of this test here: The Pragmatic Engineer Test: 12 Questions on Engineering Culture [https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/pragmatic-engineer-test/]. I've talked with dozens of software developers about what they like and dislike about their workplace - team, and company …
Engineers often have to ask each other for “estimates”– rough projections for how long projects will take. While some teams do rigorous estimation rituals to varying degrees of success, many situation
My heart was racing. My palms sweating. I was going to be fired.\nPerformance reviews had just ended, and it was time to meet my manager and be told my results. Except I knew what it would say. How else do you rate a programmer who doesn’t code?
Modern work can be frustrating and chaotic—if you don’t have the right tools. From context engineering to multimodal search, go behind the scenes and hear how Dropbox engineers are building AI that actually understands you, so you can focus on the work that matters most.
An open letter from a former Facebook and VMware engineering executive on how startups can best structure their release processes.
Hi, I am Valerie Aurora, systems archictecture consultant, writer, and cat appreciator. At Bow Shock Systems , I solve difficult systems problems in networking, file systems, and operating systems. In 2023 I moved permanently to Amsterdam after 20 years in the San Francisco Bay Area.
I waited years for someone to invest in my career. Nobody came.
Startups and scaleups are on a hiring spree for a software engineering role pioneered by Palantir. A deepdive into this role, and why FDEs are so popular in 2025
Whenever I write about a topic that upsets me, I calm myself by illustrating it with royalty-free, reassuring stock photos. "People are...
Has someone asked you to do something recently that you know you don’t have time to do but felt like you needed to do anyway? Or has someone tried to get you to help with something and impres…
I wrote a piece about the current state of job recruiting from a coder looking for work . I wondered:
A few of us at Basecamp were recently discussing how decisions get made to “green light” new projects, and I came to the conclusion that it boils down a simple rule: If you can make a decision and …
Sebastian Thrun recently announced that he was leaving Stanford to found a free, online university called Udacity . This is based on his ...
Back when I was managing at Uber, I latched onto a thinking tool that I drilled into the teams I worked with: reach the right outcomes by prioritizing the company first, your team second, and yourself third. This company/team/self framework proved itself a helpful decision-making tool, and almost always led to the…
In 2014, I wrote about how I chose my first job out of college. I’ve learned a lot in the 4 years since then—here’s how I would change my criteria if I were picking a job today.
Legal Fees: Not a Hill to Die On, But Some Parity Would be Nice
If we just see our task as documenting solutions that engineers have solved, it removes the creativity and critical thinking dimension from tech comm. The creative dimension in tech comm comes into play as we identify and solve tech comm challenges, such as devising ways to simplify complexity or otherwise improve the…
