The Pragmatic Engineer in 2025

This holiday season marks the end of the fourth year of The Pragmatic Engineer as my full-time focus, following more than a decade of working as a software engineer and engineering manager. Throughout 2025, you received 134 newsletters: a mix of in-depth deepdives, tech news in The Pulse, and conversations on software engineering in The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast.

As of today, the newsletter has 1,073,929 readers, of whom more than 200,000 have joined in the past year alone. Special thanks to paying subscribers, who get full access to all deepdives, issues of The Pulse, as well as extra resources for career growth, and content for engineering leaders. I’d like to thank everyone who reads this publication; your support is truly valued.

In this final article of 2025, I look back on the year and suggest some articles and pod episodes worth revisiting – or checking out for the first time.

Today, we cover:

1. Most popular articles. Five of the most-read, and five of my personal favorites

2. Podcast. Memorable episodes to check out

3. Tech industry in 2025. AI dominated the conversation and trends, the job market was weird, RTO accelerated, and much else

4. The Software Engineer’s Guidebook. Four more translations, a hardcover edition, and a best-seller in Japan!

See also annual reviews in 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021.

1. Most popular articles

Over the course of the year, the articles below are the ones which were read by the most subscribers.

1. How Claude Code is built. Claude Code took the industry by storm in 2025, and we sat down with two of its founding engineers. They revealed how they helped make command line interfaces (CLIs) surprisingly relevant in such a short space of time.

2. State of the software engineering job market in 2025. It’s been a bizarre 12 months in the job market, when job seekers struggled to hear back about their applications, and employers found it hard to hire solid engineers. We delved into the state of things in a three-part series on data (part 1), what hiring managers saw (part 2), and job seekers’ personal stories (part 3).

3. Real-world engineering challenges: building Cursor. Founded in 2023, Cursor became one of the most – if not the most popular – dev tools this year. A deepdive into its tech stack, engineering decisions, and the database migrations which took place behind the scenes.

4. MCP Protocol: a new AI dev-tooling building block. The Model Context Protocol that extends AI capabilities for both IDEs and AI agents. An in-depth look at the technology with its co-creator, David Soria Parra.

5. AI fakers exposed in dev recruitment: postmortem. In March, a full-remote startup nearly hired a backend engineer who didn’t exist, after they used an AI filter and a fake resume to try and hoodwink recruiters. It’s also possible the scammer was a North Korean agent. Indeed, just a few days ago, Amazon caught one posing as a US contractor. Incidents like these have probably helped contribute to a decline in the number of remote jobs, and made it harder to get hired.

My personal favorites:

1. AI Engineering in the real world. What does AI engineering look like in practice? Hands-on examples and learnings from software engineers turned “AI engineers” at seven companies – with inspiration for how it’s relatively easy for a software engineer to become an “AI engineer.”

2. Inside Google’s Engineering Culture. A broad, deep dive into how Google works from the perspective of SWEs and eng managers.

3. What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? Startups and scaleups went on a hiring spree for a software engineering role pioneered by Palantir. A deepdive into the role, and why FDEs became so popular this year.

4. Cross-platform mobile development. Cross-platform mobile development was on the rise in 2025. An in-depth look into the most popular frameworks: React Native, Flutter, native-first, and web-based technologies, and how to pick the right approach

5. The 10x “overemployed” engineer. One improbable story this year was that of a clearly talented software engineer who tricked more than a dozen Silicon Valley startups. He aced the interviews and got hired – then proceeded to do almost zero work, all the while collecting paychecks and seeking out more job interviews. The music stopped for this blagger when one frustrated founder who’d hired and fired him went public.

See all deepdives of 2025 here.

2. The podcast

I launched The Pragmatic Engineer podcast 18 months ago because I was having interesting conversations with tech folks during research for the written articles, and it felt like a bit of a waste to not share these talks with readers in more detail. Overall, I’ve been very happy with the decision to experiment with the podcast format.

This has been the pod’s first full year, and the feedback has been positive. When I meet people at conferences and events, around a third say they discovered The Pragmatic Engineer via the podcast. At the end of this year, the podcast has crossed 10M downloads across YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other apps. In 2026, I’ll prioritize quality over quantity even more, so expect two or three episodes per month on Wednesdays.

Here are some highlights from the podcast in 2025, which are good places to start if you’re diving into the show for the first time:

1. How Linux is built with Greg Kroah-Hartman: the longtime Linux kernel maintainer breaks down the inner workings of Linux development; from its unique trust model, to the benefits of open-source contribution. This is the episode that was most popular with listeners this year, judging by the feedback.