Episode · The Pragmatic Engineer · 2026-07-08
Books mentioned on The Pragmatic Engineer AMA
Brought to You By: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.
Gergely Orosz recommended A Philosophy of Software Design by John K. Ousterhout and Tidy First? by Kent Beck.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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A Philosophy of Software Design
A Philosophy of Software Design by John K.
Recommended“It's one of the philosophy of software design. I just love this book. It's still to this day, the only book that actually compares architecture approaches between like groups of students and what we can learn from that.”
Where to get it
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Tidy First?
Tidy First? by Kent Beck is a software development book that explores the philosophy and practice of small, deliberate structural changes to codebases to improve maintainability before tackling larger feature implementations.
Recommended“And then I also enjoyed Kent Beck's tidy first book. It's a really thin book, but I just like how crisp every single idea is, even though like that book might be a bit less relevant when you're writing a bit less code”
Where to get it
Other mentions in this episode (4) — ad reads, self-promotion and passing references, never counted
“And my plan was leave Uber, finish writing the software engineer's guidebook, which is something I started writing at Uber, just finish it in six months.”
Passing Chaos Monkeys
“There's a book about a chaos. I'm not sure if Chaos Monkeys covers it, but, but it has been really well documented where Meta went full on, on wartime mode.”
“Other than the book and newsletter, uh, what's something surprising you have found through your writing? Usually just find, find ideas as, as, as they go because they fester.”
“Right now, this book stayed surprisingly durable for AI because it doesn't, it didn't contain too much about coding to start with. But the non-technical parts, things like understand the business, think about software architecture, those are more relevant”