The Pulse: Bending Spoons' Acquisition Strategy
In only 5 years, Hopin went from zero to a $7.7B valuation, and back to zero again. Also: Bending Spoons’ startup acquisition model.
The Pragmatic Engineer
Observations across the software engineering industry.
Latest posts
The Pulse: Quitting Spotify Podcasts over reliability
Spotify’s podcast platform has become chronically unreliable since the company’s leadership started boasting about AI adoption. Competitors haven’t had similar issues, so I offboarded from Spotify.
The Pulse: New trend - concern about massive increase in code review load
Top of mind for engineering leaders: what to do about the growing code review load, and how devs are starting to review code less thoroughly than before? Many questions, but few proven solutions.
The Pulse: What can we learn from Bun’s rapid Rust rewrite with AI?
To a sceptic, spending $165K to migrate Bun from Zig to Rust sounds very expensive. But to a realist, shortening a 1-2 year migration down to 11 days opens amazing new opportunities for devs. However, a thoroughly-tested project is required to pull it off.
The Pulse: Interesting AI coding stats from Cursor
Power users generate 10x as many lines of code vs the median, most of the AI spend is coming from input tokens not output ones, and almost half of AI changes are accepted without manual review by devs (!!)
The Pulse: a new trend, smart model routing
Are there any ‘intelligent’ router solutions out there which select the right model for the right task? I looked into it, and there are a few options.
Pollen tried to remove my article about CEO Callum Negus-Fancey and CTO Bradley Wright, and Google is assisting with it
In 2022, I wrote about the damning fall of events tech company Pollen. The short of it: Pollen seemed to have pulled off the improbable feat of building a business in the notoriously low margin industry of events, surviving Covid-19, and building a solid software engineering organization. In April
Reliability fail: No automated zone failover for Coinbase’s global trading service
Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover Big Tech and startups through the lens of senior engineers and engineering leaders. Today, we cover one out of four topics from this past The Pulse issue . Full subscribers received the
The Pulse: a trend of trying to cut back on AI spend within eng departments?
Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover Big Tech and startups through the lens of senior engineers and engineering leaders. Today, we cover one out of four topics from The Pulse issue from two weeks ago. Full subscribers
The Pulse: Antigravity 2.0 takes ‘IDE’ out of its new IDE
Feedback about the redesigned IDE is overwhelmingly negative due to bugs, poor UX & model support, and eating through Gemini token quotas. Also: a clue that Antigravity’s own devs use other tools for their work?
The Pulse: Forward deployed engineering heats up again
Massive demand for the role at Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The latest version of the FDE role looks like the consultant / solution architect role done by many early-junior engineers.
Google Cloud deletes Australian trading fund’s infra
A $124B fund in Australia would have lost all data stored with Google Cloud, had they not relied on a third-party backup. A rare blunder from GCP, where regional replication did not stop the deletion – and a just as rare statement from Google Cloud’s CEO taking the blame.
The Pulse: Did capacity shortages turn Anthropic hostile to devs?
For the past few weeks, Anthropic has continually upset devs with its “dumber” model, and by removing Claude Code access from some paid accounts. After securing lots of compute from SpaceX, could the reason have been to conceal capacity issues?
TechPays has been acquired by Levels.fyi
tl;dr: TechPays is joining Levels.fyi : so the leading tech salary site in Europe gets the love and care it deserves. Thanks to Zsombor for building this project with me for so many years. Pay transparency has always been an issue in tech, especially in Europe. For a while,
The Pulse: AI load breaks GitHub – why not other vendors?
GitHub’s leadership blames the 3.5x increase in service load as the cause of degradation – or it might be self-inflicted.