Eight years ago, I became an engineering manager at Uber. We had an apprentice management program which was really cool. They gave me a bunch of training. I connected with like fellow folks who had no clue what engineering management is. But then I got a new manager, Shaolin, and she told me and I told on our first one-on-one, she said, "How can I support you?" And I said, "Look, Shaolin, I'll be real with you. Uber is new to me. Working inside a Silicon Valley company that is growing faster than any company in the history—that was back Uber. This is all new to me and I need support. I would like to learn from the best." And she said, "Of course, I'll connect you with folks, but why don't you get a subscription, get the best possible subscription that money can buy for any magazine, do your research and do that." And so I did, and the best I could find was Harvard Business Review at the time. You know, they write really cool stuff about management, some people are nodding, but it didn't feel that it was talking about what I was doing inside tech leading a team, working with technology things. The articles felt very generic. And so I did what made most sense. I wrote them an email saying, "Hey, I'd write for you about engineering management, what it was like inside of Uber. Are you interested?" And I never received a response. Man, someone's kicking themselves up there.

I got a lot of mentors. I grew. I learned a lot about these things. And then the next thing that happened is I became a manager of managers. I had my first manager under me and I asked a meeting with my skip level, an engineer who was very new to Uber and he said, "Gerge, I feel a bit stuck. I've been trying to read the whole code base, I don't understand, it's so different. At my old company we used to be given Jira tickets, now people are telling me I need to create my own like Fabricator tickets. It's confusing. How can I get better and more importantly how can I become one day that senior engineer?" I was hired as an L2, he used to be a super principal engineer, kind of pissed. So there's a lot to unpack there, but I was like, I've done this before. I could close my eyes by that point in my team, everyone who was on my team was promoted at least once. I knew how to mentor people. I knew how to help them. But for this person, I figured this is not my place. They've got a manager. I shouldn't be the one spending... it's kind of uncool to my manager to do this. And I figured, would it not be nice to have a book that I could give to them just with my two cents that I've seen work? And so I started writing this book at Uber. I worked with a publisher but the book never got ready. And then just so happens COVID happened. Without COVID none of this might have happened. Uber had layoffs. It was a tough time. Our business was collapsing. Quarter of our team was let go. The rest of my team I had to reallocate elsewhere because our mission and vision did not make sense. I got demotivated. And at that point I decided, let me just leave Uber a little bit and finish this book that I've been writing, which later turned out to a software engineer guidebook. As with any good project, I thought it would take six months, but it's always six months ahead. Funny how that is, right? Software engineering, writing a book. And nine months into this like self-imposed fun-employment, I was like "What am I doing right now?" My plan was finish a book, raise some money, do a startup, something platform engineering, control-C control-V for an internal Uber project and turn it into a startup.

That's the moment that I saw there's an opportunity to maybe just like write a newsletter like carry on on my book. And at that point it all clicked. I was like let me write this newsletter that I could never buy, that there was not out there. And that's what The Pragmatic Engineer is. I just started to write the advice, the insights, the open secrets that were clear to me and clear to some of you who are already working in here. But a lot of people didn't know or even the people who did know, they didn't see it written down as clearly. This newsletter immediately got massive traction. There was no advertisement involved, no nothing. And it just grew. It became first the top selling technology news on Substack. It then four years later crossed 1 million subscribers in total who are subscribing again without any advertisement. And during that path I realized like this is something special. I started to do a podcast because I did a lot of interviews with people and I always felt it was a shame that we had some really good conversations with folks, you know really animated, it was never captured. So the podcast also became just really, really successful. And the last part that was missing that I always thought about but I never thought it could happen is this—is us coming together, people who care about the tech industry, the software engineering. We don't like the hype but we want to know what is actually happening and get together. This is why this event is so special. We are all working in tech mostly in the software engineering field that is now turning into a little bit AI engineering as well, not a little bit, a lot honestly. And there's all of us from across the world like these ideas are bringing us together.

The other thing that makes this event very special is the speakers. I was joking that it's almost like the Pragmatic Engineer Cinematic Universe because all the speakers are people who have been either on my podcast or they did a deep dive with me. You can get their books down on the fourth floor and you can also walk up to them and ask for them to sign those books as well. Another thing that makes it really, really special is the organizing team. Statsig is a company known for their experimentation, their advanced experimentation systems and feature flagging and many, many more things. But turns out they're moonlighting as the Bay Area's single best event organizer. Finally, the thing that makes this thing the most special is you. It's all the attendees. When we did this event, we turned everything upside down. This is not event where we wanted to make a profit on. We're actually just break even with the tickets and those costs. We had closer to 2,000 people apply to attend and we're very careful in selecting folks who we think are builders, are experienced professionals, are people who are optimistic about the future of technology and also just curious. I bet that today there will be a friendship formed or a connection made that will lead to an incredible startup and potentially a massive tech company in two to three years. And the more I thought about it, I'm pretty sure there will be not just one, there will be more. Let's make this count.