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

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