• 2 hours 51 minutes
    Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightower

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    Kelsey Hightower went from a self-taught technician installing DSL modems to becoming one of Google’s elite Distinguished Engineers, whom the CEO of Microsoft personally tried to recruit. Hightower’s career achievements are rooted in hard work and self-directed learning, and today he’s one of the most influential voices in modern infrastructure, through his talks, open source work, and writing.

    In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer podcast, Kelsey and I cover his unconventional path into tech and the lessons he’s learned during three decades in the industry. We discuss his entrepreneurial years, building a reputation through open source, the rise of containers and Kubernetes, and his time at Google during one of the most consequential periods in cloud computing. 

    He recounts how a job offer from a big tech giant led to the biggest raise of his career, what prompted him to slow down after years of career acceleration, and we also discuss his perspective on AI. Throughout, Kelsey keeps a simple idea front of mind: that technology is ultimately about people. Whether it’s infrastructure, leadership, careers, or AI, he argues that the goal is not to build technology for its own sake; it’s to solve meaningful human problems.

    Timestamps

    00:00 Intro

    03:34 Kelsey’s first job at McDonald’s

    05:04 His non-traditional path into tech

    11:45 Landing his first tech job with an A+ certification

    15:33 His entrepreneurial years

    19:45 Joining Google as a data center technician

    27:48 Learning automation at a Rackspace spinoff

    33:26 Moving into financial services

    50:00 Building a reputation through open source

    53:55 From configuration management to containers

    1:08:20 The rise of Kubernetes

    1:25:05 Why he almost joined NASA instead of Google

    1:29:20 Defining DevRel at Google

    1:38:20 Demonstrating impact at Google

    1:41:20 Microsoft's offer

    1:55:20 Learning how to slow down

    2:06:39 Advising and investing

    2:15:03 A people-first view of GenAI

    2:24:27 Using AI with guardrails

    2:28:26 Matching AI to the task

    2:36:06 Staying relevant in the AI era

    The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:

    Career paths for software engineers at large tech companies

    The past and future of modern backend practices

    How Kubernetes is built

    How Linux is built

    The Staff Engineer’s Path: You’re a role model now (sorry!)

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    3 June 2026, 5:59 pm
  • 1 hour 20 minutes
    Building OpenCode with Dax Raad

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    OpenCode is one of the fastest-growing AI developer tools around, surging in just a few months from roughly 650,000 monthly active users to nearly 8 million, and almost 1M daily active users.

    In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast, we meet Dax Raad, co-founder of OpenCode, for a discussion about the gaps in developer tooling that led him to build OpenCode, the advantages of open source, and why taste and engineering judgment matter even more as AI becomes a core part of software development.

    We also cover how OpenCode turned Anthropic’s blocking of integration with Claude Code into a massive growth lever by partnering with OpenAI and other model providers, why GPU demand is becoming a bottleneck everywhere, how come AI coding tools don’t automatically mean engineering teams move faster, and also why Dax is personally skeptical about predictions for the future of engineering and work, in general.

    I found this conversation especially interesting because Dax displays a healthy skepticism toward the benefits of AI, even while building one of the most popular AI coding harnesses.

    Timestamps

    00:00 Intro

    07:03 Dax’s path into tech

    09:04 Early startup experience

    13:16 Getting involved with open source

    16:13 OpenCode

    23:17 Anthropic banning OpenCode

    30:34 From terminal to GUI

    32:34 OpenCode’s business model

    36:33 Why inference is profitable

    39:11 GPU bottlenecks

    40:54 AI hype

    45:50 AI spending

    48:47 Dax’s memo

    55:41 Dax’s skepticism of predictions

    58:58 Engineering culture at OpenCode

    1:02:38 How building works at OpenCode

    1:05:36 Taste and quality

    1:11:32 Dax’s work setup

    1:12:35 The role of engineers and EMs

    1:15:50 Advice for engineers

    1:18:12 Book recommendation

    The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:

    How Claude Code is built

    How Codex is built

    Real-world engineering challenges: building Cursor

    The AI Engineering stack

    How Uber uses AI for development: inside look

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    27 May 2026, 4:07 pm
  • 1 hour 4 minutes
    Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhl

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    Rust is one of the most admired programming languages around – and also one of the hardest to learn. What makes developers stick with it?

    In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast, I sit down with Alice Ryhl, a software engineer on Google’s Android Rust team, and a core maintainer of Tokio, which is the most widely-used async runtime in Rust.

    We discuss what makes Rust different from other languages like TypeScript, Go, and C++, and why so many developers say that “once it compiles, it works.” We go deep into memory safety, ownership, borrowing, unsafe Rust, and Cargo.

    We also cover how Rust is governed by RFCs, feature flags, its six-week release cycle, how engineers get paid to work on the language, and also look into how Rust’s use inside the Linux kernel is progressing.

    Timestamps

    (00:00) Intro

    (04:09) Tokio: an overview

    (05:11) What Alice likes about Rust

    (12:48) Rust for TypeScript engineers

    (13:51) Moving from C++ to Rust

    (14:34) Memory safety

    (18:12) Garbage collection tradeoffs

    (21:46) Ownership, references, and borrowing

    (26:59) Unsafe in Rust

    (31:21) Crates and Cargo

    (35:55) Language design and RFCs

    (43:02) Building new features

    (46:30) Editions vs. versions

    (49:47) Getting paid to work on Rust

    (51:27) Contributing to Rust

    (53:03) Rust in the Linux kernel

    (55:45) AI use cases for Rust

    (1:01:35) Learning Rust

    (1:03:54) Book recommendation

    The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:

    The past and future of modern backend practices

    How Kotlin was built with Andrey Breslav

    How Swift was built with Chris Lattner

    How Linux is built with Greg KH

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    20 May 2026, 4:22 pm
  • 1 hour 15 minutes
    TypeScript, C# and Turbo Pascal with Anders Hejlsberg

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    Anders Hejlsberg is a living legend and one of the most influential programming language designers of all time. He created Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, and also TypeScript. As well as that, he spent nearly a decade at the pioneering dev tools company, Borland, and is now in his 30th year of working at Microsoft, where he’s a Technical Fellow.

    In this episode, we discuss what it takes to build programming languages that developers love to use, and trace his career from writing his first compiler to creating Turbo Pascal and Delphi, and helping to pioneer modern software development through C# and TypeScript.

    Anders details how C# was designed by a small group of experienced language designers who met a few hours each week, and he explains why tooling was just as important as the language for TypeScript’s success, and what he has learned from building languages which stay relevant for decades.

    We also look into how Anders uses AI today, which language features suit AI-assisted development, and what he thinks is changing in the craft of software engineering as developers move further away from writing code line by line.

    Timestamps

    (00:00) Intro

    (02:48) How Anders got into programming 

    (05:40) Building his first compiler 

    (07:44) Turbo Pascal

    (12:25) Delphi 

    (14:53) Joining Microsoft

    (19:41) Building C# 

    (29:11) Async/await

    (34:01) The rise of JavaScript

    (37:52) Building TypeScript

    (42:58) How the TypeScript compiler works 

    (48:30) JavaScript’s strengths and weaknesses

    (52:18) How Anders uses AI 

    (56:03) What language features work well with AI 

    (1:02:49) How software craftsmanship is changing

    (1:07:49) Performance and efficiency 

    (1:09:29) Anders’ tool stack 

    (1:11:30) A 30-year career at Microsoft

    (1:13:40) Book recommendation

    The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:

    Microsoft’s developer tools roots

    50 Years of Microsoft and developer tools with Scott Guthrie

    How Linux is built with Greg Kroah-Hartman

    How will AI change operating systems? Part 1: Ubuntu and Linux

    How Uber uses AI for development: inside look

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    13 May 2026, 5:06 pm
  • 1 hour 33 minutes
    Building Pi, and what makes self-modifying software so fascinating

    Brought to You By:

    Statsig — ⁠ The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more.

    Sonar – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for automated code review

    WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.

    Mario Zechner is the creator of Pi, a minimalist, self-modifying AI coding agent, that is the foundation upon which OpenClaw (created by Peter Steinberger) is built. Meanwhile, Armin Ronacher is the creator of Flask, and a longtime user of Pi. The pair are also friends.

    I sat down with Mario and Armin for the latest episode of the Pragmatic Engineer Podcast for an interesting conversation about AI and their reservations about it – even though both are heavily invested in building AI-powered tools.

    Mario explains why he built Pi, and gives his take on why it has become so popular. Armin walks us through how he uses AI tools, including building a game with Pi, and why he always puts human judgment firmly at the heart of his approach.

    We cover the risks of over-automation, the limits of agentic workflows, and why strong engineers with informed judgment still matter. We also get into the challenges of working with code written by non-engineers, and whether open source can withstand a tidal wave of agent-generated code.

    Timestamps

    (00:00) Intro

    (07:30) How Mario, Armin, and Peter Steinberger met(15:15) How 30 dev teams use AI agents: learnings

    (21:50) The importance of judgment

    (24:26) Challenges when non-engineers write code

    (28:30) Downsides of over-automation

    (32:18) Pi

    (48:09) OpenClaw + Pi

    (50:54) “Clankers”

    (57:32) Open source and AI

    (1:00:22) Complexity as the enemy

    (1:02:50) Building an AI-native startup

    (1:11:52) “Slow the F down”

    (1:16:40) MCPs vs. CLI

    (1:25:03) Predictions and staying up to date

    The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:

    The impact of AI on software engineers in 2026: key trends

    Cycles of disruption in the tech industry

    The AI engineering stack

    The creator of OpenClaw: "I ship code that I don't read"

    What is inference engineering? Deepdive

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    29 April 2026, 2:30 pm
  • 1 hour 25 minutes
    Designing Data-intensive Applications with Martin Kleppmann

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    Sonar – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for automated code review

    WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.

    Martin Kleppmann is a researcher and the author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications, one of the most influential books on modern distributed systems. As of this month, the second, heavily updated edition of the book is out.

    In this episode of Pragmatic Engineer, we discuss Martin’s career in tech building startups, how he ended up writing this iconic book, and what he’s focused on now after moving into academia.

    We talk about the tradeoffs behind modern infrastructure, how the cloud has changed what it means to scale, and the thinking behind Designing Data-Intensive Applications, including what’s changing in the second edition.

    Martin reflects on lessons from building startups like Rapportive, which he sold to LinkedIn, and shares how his experience in both academia and industry shaped his perspective.

    We also explore what’s ahead: why formal verification may become more important in an AI-assisted world, the challenges of building local-first software, and his recent research into using cryptography to improve transparency in supply chains without exposing sensitive data.

    Timestamps

    (00:00) Early career

    (05:46) Building Rapportive

    (10:47) Working at LinkedIn

    (14:09) Writing Designing Data-Intensive Applications

    (23:00) Reliability, scalability, and repeatability 

    (26:24) DDIA: the second edition

    (30:50) Tradeoffs of using cloud services 

    (39:02) How the cloud changed scaling 

    (42:53) The trouble with distributed systems

    (49:02) Ethics for software engineers 

    (52:45) Formal verification

    (1:00:12) Academia vs. industry 

    (1:03:50) Local-first software 

    (1:09:50) Computer science education

    (1:18:32) Martin’s current research and advice

    The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:

    Building Bluesky: a distributed social network

    Inside Uber’s move to the cloud

    The history of servers, the cloud, and what’s next

    The past and future of modern backend practices

    How Kubernetes is built

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    22 April 2026, 4:19 pm
  • 1 hour 46 minutes
    DHH’s new way of writing code

    Brought to You By:

    Statsig — ⁠ The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more.

    Sonar – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for automated code review

    WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.

    David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) is the creator of Ruby on Rails and Omarchy, co-founder and CTO of 37signals (maker of Basecamp and HEY), and the author of several books including the best-seller, Remote: Office Not Required, co-written with Jason Fried.

    Six months ago, in an episode of the Lex Fridman podcast, David shared how he doesn’t use AI tools to write code: he types out all his code. But things have changed a lot since then. 

    In this episode, we discuss his approach to building software, how it’s changed in the last six months, and why he now takes an agent-first approach, and how he barely writes any code by hand. We go into how he uses AI agents: which alter how he builds and explores ideas, but also how his standards of quality and craft remain the same.

    We also discuss how 37signals thinks about product development, from the role of designers to the importance of aesthetics and taste. David gets into how he sees beauty and functionality as closely linked, and why strong opinions about design lead to better software.

    Finally, we look into the uneven impact of AI which amplifies senior engineers while creating challenges for junior developers, and what this may mean for the role of the software engineer.

    Timestamps

    (00:00) Intro

    (02:11) Omarchy and Ruby on Rails

    (08:25) 37signals overview

    (10:12) Launching HEY

    (18:38) Building HEY

    (22:47) Designers at 37signals

    (28:08) The craft of design

    (31:52) Why DHH now embraces AI workflows

    (39:45) The AI inflection point

    (44:23) DHH’s agent-first workflow

    (55:09) AI’s impact on junior developers

    (1:03:08) Developer experience with AI

    (1:16:43) What does AI mean for developers?

    (1:23:33) 37signals teams and hiring

    (1:38:20) Work-life balance with AI

    (1:41:41) Why DHH keeps building

    (1:45:24) Closing

    The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:

    Are AI agents actually slowing us down?

    How Claude Code is built

    The future of software engineering with AI: six predictions

    The AI Engineering Stack

    Mitchell Hashimoto’s new way of writing code

    How Linux is built with Greg Kroah-Hartman

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    8 April 2026, 5:16 pm
  • 1 hour 38 minutes
    Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber’s first CTO)

    Brought to You By:

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    WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.

    Thuan Pham was Uber's first and longest-serving CTO, and today he’s the CTO of Faire, a B2B wholesale platform. Back when Thuan joined Uber, it had around 40 engineers and 30,000 rides per day, and the system crashed multiple times a week. Over seven years, he helped rebuild the system, move it from a monolith to microservices, and scaled the engineering organization behind it. I had the privilege of working with Thuan for four of those seven years. Later, the very first issue of The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter was a deepdive into Uber’s Program and Platform split. This episode of the podcast contains a nice “full circle” moment, where Thuan shares even more details about why Uber chose to embrace that structure.

    We discuss what it takes to operate and build in that kind of environment. Thuan explains how he divided his time at Uber into three “tours of duty,” from stabilizing a fragile system, to re-architecting it, and scaling the org.

    We go deep into the platform-and-program split, the Helix app rewrite, and what it took to launch Uber in China in just five months (the original estimate was 18 months). We also cover Uber’s in-house tools and explain why they were necessary to support rapid growth.

    Finally, we discuss his role today as CTO of Faire, how the company is using AI, and how he sees AI changing software engineering.

    Timestamps

    (00:00) Intro

    (05:32) Getting into tech

    (16:09) The dot-com bust

    (20:42) VMware

    (26:29) Getting hired by Travis at Uber

    (33:22) Early days at Uber and scaling challenges

    (40:57) Uber’s China launch

    (47:12) The platform and program split

    (50:26) From monolith to microservices 

    (53:38) Internal tools at Uber 

    (57:05) Helix: Uber’s mobile app rewrite

    (59:55) Thuan’s email about naming

    (1:02:03) Org structure changes under

    (1:06:34) Thuan’s work philosophy 

    (1:12:23) The “three tours of duty” at Uber

    (1:15:37) Why Thuan left Uber 

    (1:17:34) Coupang and Nubank

    (1:21:59) Faire

    (1:25:31) How Faire uses AI

    (1:28:24) AI’s impact on software engineering 

    (1:31:09) The role of the CTO 

    (1:35:13) Career advice

    The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:

    How Uber uses AI for development: inside look

    The Platform and Program split at Uber

    How Uber is measuring engineering productivity

    Inside Uber’s move to the cloud

    Uber's crazy YOLO app rewrite, from the front seat

    How Uber built its observability platform

    Developer experience at Uber with Gautam Korlam

    Uber’s engineering level changes

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    1 April 2026, 4:49 pm
  • 1 hour 10 minutes
    Building WhatsApp with Jean Lee

    Brought to You By:

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    WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.

    How did a tiny team of 30 engineers build the world-famous messaging app more than a decade ago, and what can dev teams learn from that feat today? Jean Lee was engineer #19 at WhatsApp, joining when the company was still small, with almost no formal processes. She helped it scale to hundreds of millions of users, went through the $19B acquisition by Facebook, and later worked at Meta.

    In this episode of Pragmatic Engineer, I talk with Jean about what it was like building WhatsApp. When Facebook bought WhatsApp in 2014, only around 30 engineers supported hundreds of millions of users across eight platforms.

    We discuss how the founders kept things simple, saying “no” to most feature requests for years. Jean explains why WhatsApp chose Erlang for the backend, why the team avoided cross-platform abstractions, and how charging users $1 per year paid everyone’s salaries, while keeping growth intentionally slow.

    Jean also shares what the Facebook acquisition was like on the inside, how she dealt with sudden personal wealth, and what it was like transitioning from an IC to a manager at Facebook – including the reality of calibration meetings and performance reviews.

    We also discuss how AI enables smaller engineering teams, and why WhatsApp’s experience suggests ownership and trust might matter more than tools.

    Timestamps

    (00:00) Intro

    (01:39) Early years in tech

    (06:18) Becoming engineer #19 at WhatsApp

    (13:53) WhatsApp’s tech stack

    (18:09) WhatsApp’s unique ways of working

    (25:27) Countdown displays and outages

    (27:07) Why WhatsApp won

    (28:53) The Facebook acquisition

    (33:13) Life after acquisition

    (39:27) Working at Facebook in London

    (44:07) Transitioning to management

    (47:27) Performance reviews as a manager

    (53:29) After Facebook

    (58:53) AI’s impact on engineering

    (1:02:34) Jean’s advice to new grads and startups

    (1:06:45) Empowering employees

    (1:08:17) Book recommendations

    The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:

    How Meta built Threads

    How Big Tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum

    Performance calibrations at tech companies

    Software engineers leading projects

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    18 March 2026, 5:20 pm
  • 1 hour 31 minutes
    From IDEs to AI Agents with Steve Yegge

    Brought to You By:

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    WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.

    Steve Yegge has spent decades writing software and thinking about how the craft evolves. From his early years at Amazon and Google, to his influential blog posts, he has often been early at spotting shifts in how software gets built. 

    In this episode of Pragmatic Engineer, I talk with Steve about how AI is changing engineering work, why he believes coding by hand may gradually disappear, and what developers should focus on, instead. We discuss his latest book, Vibe Coding, and the open-source AI agent orchestrator he built called Gas Town, which he said most devs should avoid using.

    Steve shares his framework for levels of AI adoption by engineers, ranging from avoiding AI tools entirely, to running multiple agents in parallel. We discuss why he believes the knowledge that engineers need to know keeps changing, and why understanding how systems evolve may matter more than mastering any particular tool.

    We also explore broader implications. Steve argues that AI’s role is not primarily to replace engineers, but to amplify them. At the same time, he warns that the pace of change will create new kinds of technical debt, new productivity pressures, and fresh challenges for how teams operate.

    Timestamps

    (00:00) Intro

    (01:43) Steve’s latest projects

    (02:27) Important blog posts

    (04:48) Shifts in what engineers need to know

    (10:46) Steve’s current AI stance

    (13:23) Steve’s book Vibe Coding

    (18:25) Layoffs and disruption in tech

    (31:13) Gas Town

    (40:10) New ways of working

    (51:08) The problem of too many people

    (54:45) Why AI results lag in business

    (59:57) Gamification and product stickiness

    (1:04:54) The ‘Bitter Lesson’ explained

    (1:07:14) The future of software development

    (1:23:06) Where languages stand

    (1:24:47) Adapting to change

    (1:27:32) Steve’s predictions 

    The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:

    Vibe coding as a software engineer

    The full circle of developer productivity with Steve Yegge

    AI Tooling for Software Engineers in 2026

    The AI Engineering Stack

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    11 March 2026, 4:58 pm
  • 1 hour 37 minutes
    Building Claude Code with Boris Cherny

    Brought to You By:

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    WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.

    Boris Cherny is the creator and Head of Claude Code at Anthropic. He previously spent five years at Meta as a Principal Engineer and is the author of the book Programming TypeScript.

    In this episode of Pragmatic Engineer, we went through how Claude Code was built and what it means when engineers no longer write most of the code themselves.

    We discuss how Claude Code evolved from a side project into a core internal tool at Anthropic and how Boris uses it day-to-day. We go deep into workflow details, including parallel agents, PR structure, deterministic review patterns, and how the system retrieves context from large codebases. We also get into how Claude Cowork was built.

    As coding becomes more accessible, the role of engineers shifts rather than shrinks. We examine what that shift means in practice, which skills become more important, and why the lines between product, engineering, and design are blurring.

    Timestamps

    (00:00) Intro

    (11:15) Lessons from Meta

    (19:46) Joining Anthropic

    (23:08) The origins of Claude Code

    (32:55) Boris's Claude Code workflow

    (36:27) Parallel agents

    (40:25) Code reviews

    (47:18) Claude Code's architecture

    (52:38) Permissions and sandboxing

    (55:05) Engineering culture at Anthropic

    (1:05:15) Claude Cowork

    (1:12:48) Observability and privacy

    (1:14:45) Agent swarms

    (1:21:16) LLMs and the printing press analogy

    (1:30:16) Standout engineer archetypes

    (1:32:12) What skills still matter for engineers

    (1:35:24) Book recommendations

    The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:

    How Claude Code is built

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    4 March 2026, 6:09 pm
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