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The Pragmatic Engineer

What the engineers at The Pragmatic Engineer write about, ranked by depth and by what readers find useful.

Writes aboutArchitecture (1)Distributed Systems (1)

  1. 01The Pragmatic Engineer · architecture

    The Pulse: Anthropic builds its own source control system

    Anthropic experienced a massive increase in code merges due to the heavy use of AI coding agents, which quickly overwhelmed standard Git scaling limits and CI checkouts. To solve this, a small engineering team built a custom centralized version control system called Scion backed by Google Spanner and Cloud Storage, along with a code review tool called Antique. This move successfully migrated the entire monorepo off Git and eliminated bottlenecks, though the architecture drew controversy over similarities to Meta's Mononoke.

    DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read3 days ago

    ArchitectureDistributed Systems

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  2. 02The Pragmatic Engineer · postmortem

    The Pulse: Firebase’s global outage & poor response

    A routine configuration cleanup by Google caused a malformed payload that triggered global crashes in iOS apps using the Firebase SDK. The Firebase team rolled back the backend change after a couple of hours, though client-side caching prolonged the recovery for some users. Google later published a postmortem citing missing input validation in the iOS SDK and committed to improving status dashboards for client-side issues.

    DEPTH ■■■■■8 min read2 weeks ago

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