Gergely Orosz
Writing The Pragmatic Engineer (@pragmaticengineer.com), the #1 technology newsletter on Substack. Author of The Software Engineer's Guidebook (engguidebook.com). Formerly at Uber, Skype, Skyscanner. More at pragmaticengineer.com
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- Mass layoffs at Microsoft under Satya Nadella (2014-2025): 3 Under Steve Ballmer (2000-2014): 1 Under Bill Gates (1975-2000): 0 [I do think Steve Ballmer should probably get more credit than he does]
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- The Dot Com Bubble and The Great Recession were FAR worse and more impactful on the industry than anything in recent years. Not sure exactly what you mean.
- After 15 straight years of being the prime minister of Hungary, Orban's popularity has nosedived thanks to the economy tanking. He is looking to lose power in 2026. His solution: a Russia-style crackdown to ban the remainder of the free press and the most popular political party
- Europe has let Hungary get away with a LOT without invoking Article 7, but they won't let him get away with literal rigged elections. That's too far for even the most timid European countries.
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- At least it's gonna be a simple EU: yes/no election* next April. *No free election = "no".
- Think about what used to be a massive barrier to entry for games development: Writing a games engine. What happened when this barrier was eliminated with incredibly accessible games engines (eg Unity) so nearly anyone can write a game? Game dev "democratized" if you will?
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- So the difficulty here is that I actually worked in plumbing and I can tell you that you're omitting a lot of complexity and risk involved in botching a task. Water has no chill and is a literal force of nature. Also drain? Free outflow scenario? Yeah, work on that. Inflow and pressure? GL.
- "The biggest barrier for non-plumbers to do plumbing is not knowing how to do plumbing. So what happens when that barrier disapperars thanks to youtube tutorials?" Yeah, I wonder. LLMs are nothing like game engines, which are usually extracted from a bigger project, well understood and tested.
- Though the analogy is funny, it's not accurate 😄 A better one would be "the biggest barrier for non-builders to build houses is not knowing how to pour cement". The point is that a game (/house) is way bigger than coding (/cement). It requires many other disciplines such as funding, planning etc.
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- I just tried it for Barcelona, it gave me a list of what looked overhyped, overpriced restaurants, one of which I've been at recently. I tried to give it feedback about that particular place, and then it confirmed that I am right, and it's better to avoid it or other similar places. Classic LLM.
- In 2014, Russia started an unprovoked war on Ukraine, aiming to seize all of Ukraine. It launched an all-out invasion in 2022. I do not understand how anyone can possibly be taking the side of Russia and Putin. This war is not “self defense:” it is brutality and war crimes.
- That Russia is unwilling to accept any form of ceasefire is no surprise: they are the agressor and the only reason for the war. Ukraine is defending itself heroically. Europe needs to step up to support Ukraine even more, stop Russian aggression once and for all. Slava Ukraini 🇺🇦
- Hard to do when more and more countries keep voting for Putin apologists, with Romania on the brink We need to rethink European institutions from the ground up
- Russia attacked because of Putin's grand vision to Make Russia Great Again, which is documented extensively. Meanwhile Russia has allies around the world, including the American right, who are motivated financially, ideologically, and politically to parrot Russia's "See what you made me do" rhetoric
- A dev I talked to said his favorite tool for development recently is called: (I was expecting some AI IDE) (Drumroll… it wasn’t) Tuple! It’s a lair programming tool that allows “taking over” the other person’s screen/IDE. Apparently his whole team uses it daily & love it
- I’ve used Tupperware for a few years for my open source work (yay free license for open source maintainers). It is miles better than zoom, and doesn’t lock you into doing everything in an IDE. I’ll be introducing it to my teams at work soon
- Thread 👇
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- It’s such a great app! It feels like you’re sat next to your pair - completely different class to screen sharing in zoom/meet, and has nice touches such as obscuring sensitive apps like 1Password from your pair
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- I mean, Tuple has also been around for years too (~2019), and lets you use apps other than VSCode. Liveshare is good, but it can be frustrating when you’re trying to show something outside of the editor.
- Can confirm, use it multiple times a day. Fantastic software.
- Tuple is pretty cool. 🆒
- Many of us remember using ScreenHero to do this in the early 2010s. Slack gobbled it up and made a worse version of it
- We have it widely in use at Square / Block. When I set up meetings in gcal I often have it generate a Tuple link instead of a Google Meet link, if we're going to pair or mob.
- Tupperware! Thank you Autocorrect!
- #TodayILearned about Tuple. I tried using something like this some years back, but it wasn't up to par yet. Also: lair programming > pair programming > vibe coding 😀
- Lair programming... shall we define it as a group of programmers who work in constantly changing pairs/groups?
- This looks promising 👀 Saving this to show my team next week.
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- Well, in other companies I'd use screen sharing via Google Meet, but Tuple is definitely more powerful with the other person actually being able to click and write themselves. Tuple is definitely using it is part of Ant eng culture.
- That looks promising. Gonna take it for a spin ASAP.
- Enjoyed a Software Sessions podcast on how Tuple is/was built with webrtc just yesterday! Hadn't realized how old this episode was (2020) but quite enjoyable! www.softwaresessions.com/episodes/cre...
- So so so a fan of multiplayer software.
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- Absolutely love it! Cursor is still my top, but Tuple would be second for sure!
- (I keep forgetting we don't get custom GIFs) youtu.be/SW0Q0IQydAg?...
- CoScreen was the one I tried www.coscreen.co
- Shopify uses it internally because they do A LOT of peer programming. Unless, of course, with AI forced down their throat they are now mandate to just "vibe it"
- Haven’t used it in years but have very fond memories of it “just working”
- it's a beautiful app, really perfect. it's expensive for intermittent use but a total bargain for daily use
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- I’ve been doing this for…11 years now? 2020-2021 was an absolutely bizarre anomaly. I was regularly (multiple times a day) getting recruiter inbound for 300k+ jobs at fresh startups. Just bizarroland. 6-8 months later nearly all those companies were shuttered.
- @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com when he wakes up and spots another misleading analysis
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View full threadIn case you’re wondering why it makes business sense for dev tools companies to offer these tools at a steep discount or free for individuals! Devs using them for side projects could easily turn into massive business. This company employs devs in the thousands! And got an enterprise Cursor license
- I’ve had a very similar experience. It was a grassroots effort for us.
- From a perspective of a product builder, you want your product to be so good that people will want to smuggle it to work
- Can someone remind me why in 2025, when tech companies update their web sites/web apps hundreds of times per day - Apple STILL insists on App Store reviews? So mobile apps get (large and batched) updates 1x per week or less, following a development model stuck in 2010
- it's infuriating and their reviewers are inconsistent. they will ignore one thing on an onboarding screen for months then suddenly it's a blocking issue and you're stuck in review hell for days.
- Re-reading a classic. The photo doesn’t do justice to this 900-page book that is heavier than any other book I own Cannot recall reading a similarly extensive book about software development
- This and The (much lighter) Pragmatic Programmer are my favorite software development books ever. For different reasons, of course :)
- One of my all-time favourites. Steve visits complexity a lot throughout the book, giving it the attention it deserves as one of our biggest enemies.
- This is how I see it too. At every company I’ve worked at, we had all these ideas for things we wanted to do, but only like 20% of it got done because we had an engineering bottleneck. If each dev is 2x as productive (let’s just say), I don’t think that means you’d want 50% fewer devs.
- Ever since the Software Crisis, people have been trying to overcome the bottleneck caused by a lack of software engineers. That bottleneck has resulted in software engineers becoming what Cory Doctorow calls the "princes of Labor."
- Will tools like Windsurf result in fewer software engineers? "It feels like it's people hating software engineers who say this" - says Windsurf cofounder and CEO Varun Mohan In today's podcast episode, we go into the engineering challenges (+tradeoffs) of building an AI-powered IDE like Windsurf:
- Ah, this comes up a lot. Beyond MVP stuff, devs get the most out of them. If it drives down dev costs, trends have always been that more stuff is built rather than less. But, we'll see. It's one of those "it's happening regardless, so don't worry about it too much" situations.
