OK this made my life easier: my backend (for my admin portal) had an error popping up, and Sentry was bugging me about it. Sentry now built an AI agent (called "Seer") that can analyze the root cause, make a plan to fix, draft a fix, then open a PR. Just pushed it to prod after review!

These Google Workspace ads (for *paying* customers!) are driving me crazy I don't know why I would need a "virtual receptionist", what "Voice Standard" is, who "my callers" are, and why I would need to "guide them automatically" Is Google Workspace losing its mind? What next: proper ads?

My kids keep pointing out how so many ads involving kids are AI-generated. This is one example from a government agency. It’s in so many other places as well tho with kids’ posters Kids that look more like adults, have 4 fingers…is this the “modern” advertising? All AI?

The current state of Spotify's publisher's page. Comments stopped loading, everything stopped loading, links point to dead pages... a truly fascinating case study of a product falling apart

All of this comes after Spotify was bragging how they use AI for software development, publish a massive number of PRs to prod per day. But reliablity has been going down for me. To the point that today this is what my portal looked:

The last 7 weeks, Spotify had 4 outages when publishing my podcast episodes (!!). After outage #3, I asked the Podcasts team to share how they are improving reliablity. They didn't share - and it just got worse. So I am no longer publishing video podcasts on Spotify, but redirect my audio RSS.

Knowing how LLM contexts work and how to work around context limitations – aka “context engineering” – is becoming more important for software engineers working with LLMs. Dex Horthy coined the term "context engineering," and shares practical details on it: YouTube: youtu.be/Usufn8IQJgw (cont'd)

The amount of AI writing on OpenAI's docs makes me sick. Filler sentences for nothing. Mannerisms and phrases humans would not write. Has a human even read this? And all of this will change how other docs are written, and how we all talk-for the worse IMO. 🤮 developers.openai.com/cookbook/exa...

I did my first-ever AMA episode. Your questions, my answers! Watch or listen: • YouTube: youtu.be/cSIMVYjVF28 • Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/1fqJ... • Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

There are few people who have impacted the software engineering industry like @kentbeck.com has. He'd never before told his career story from start to today in one sitting - until now. What a treat: • YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddHQ... • Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/3M6h...

Tomorrow on The Pragmatic Engineer podcast - with a legend, @kentbeck.com

Naming and shaming a founder who has outsourced their complete business to AI, resulting in AI slop, noise, and me not wanting to ever talk to them. I am not even sure any more if this is a real person or just a fake persona an AI bot is using. AI slop like this is terrible.

Google removed my article about the shameful collapse of events tech company Pollen (employees lied to by CEO Callum Negus-Fancey, salaries unpaid, a seemingly deliberate $3.2M customer double charge manually initiated by CTO Brad Wright). This island will be important: (cont'd)

WTH Pollen (the events tech company that did not pay salaries of staff for months, founded by Callum Negus-Fancey) is filing a copyright claim to remove this article from Google: Go to hell. This my article, and there's zero copyright claim to be made on it blog.pragmaticengineer.com/pollen/

How are tech interviews changing, what is wrong with the CAP theorem, and what skills are becoming more important than coding, for devs? It was great to finally do an in-person episode with Navndeep Singh (Navi), the founder of NeetCode. • YouTube: youtu.be/xafwfGVBxos (cont'd)

Here's data on the market that we collected recently: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/state-of-t... Also, you can email at pulse (at) pragmaticengineer (dot) com

A recruiter messaged me about a sr eng leadership role that he's struggling to fill. Here's part of the role. Do you see the problem? They ask for a bazillion requirements (already a red flag). The company is considered a "lower-tier" company. And there's no comp listed!!

Probably the biggest compliment I've gotten for the newsletter so far. I'll have to frame this:

How is CI/CD changing because of AI, and what are sensible deployment practices more teams should be doing? Robert Erez is a CI/CD expert, having worked in this field for 10+ years, and also my former teammate at Skype. We went into deployment pipelines, GitOps, on-prem vs SaaS CI & more (cont'd)

I opened Facebook, saw AI-generated videos in my feed (undisclosed that its AI, of course, commenters clearly not noticing it). Wanted to report it. Facebook has no way to do so. Makes you realize Facebook *wants* users to post fully AI videos and it drives their business + revenue growth...

This headline is pretty accurate based on Meta folks I’ve been talking with Meta is successfully destroying their formerly standout engineering culture: forcefully assigning standout devs to this unit + the layoffs It makes no rational sense. Hiring from Meta never been easier!

Well this is massive: - Every non-US company sees how they can be cut off from US vendors with a snap of a finger. Non-US vendors getting free advertisement - What does this mean for US AI labs’ offices and employees outside the US? Reads pretty draconian What a mess

I'm using Antithesis (antithesis.com/docs/introdu...) - the presenting sponsor of the podcast) more to better understand how they test deterministically to find bugs. For one, they have a test infra that can run hours worth of testing in minutes. Eg it ran 24 hours of testing (!!) in 33 minutes:

I am so fed up with products I pay for polluting the user interface with AI-related visual clutter Google Docs now has a Gemini button hovering with no way to turn off. I do NOT want it or need it. I pay for Google Workspace, but do not want Gemini, do not need Gemini, and yet cannot turn it off

The postmortem from Coinbase's 10-hour outage is out and... damn They run global trading from a single region because of latency. OK, I understand. BUT they have no automated failover prepared! Are they praying the region never goes down?? Doesn't compute for me...

How someone ended the brief but positive personal relationship we had. I don't meet all that many people in-person, but the ones I do, I try to prioritize later on, as I would have done with this person. Sending an AI-written email is the best way to burn any personal connection

Here's what triggered to write the Trimodal nature of software engineering compensation: At a time when the median salary for senior devs in the Netherlands was ~€65K, I made €240-280K per year, about 5x that amount. Most people did not know this tier existed back then:

@kelseyhightower.com went from a technician installing DSL modems, through self-directed study and very hard work, to one of the very few Distinguished Engineer at Google whom Satya Nadella personally persuaded to join Microsoft. Then at 43, he retired from the top. (cont'd)

Podcast episode with a legend: @kelseyhightower.com (out now) Probably the best storyteller I’ve met - and what incredible stories he has! • YouTube: youtu.be/UlXpOGIpITM • Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/25qD... • Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

I'm pretty disappointed how Gmail keeps assisting for email scams by allowing sender impersonation and doing absolutely nothing about it. Here is one example. This email was NOT sent by SendGrid and is a phising email, meant to take over your SendGrid account. Gmail lets it thru