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ByteByteGo: From a Self-Published Book to a Million-Subscriber System Design Empire

Former Twitter/Apple/Zynga engineer Alex Xu self-published System Design Interview in 2020 and hit the Amazon bestseller list. In 2022, he and ex-Discord engineer Sahn Lam launched a Substack newsletter that crossed 26K subscribers in month one and hit one million in two and a half years. From book to newsletter, YouTube, and paid platform, ByteByteGo reached $3.5M ARR in 2024 with a 26-person team — all fully bootstrapped.

The Pragmatic Engineer: From Uber Payments Lead to Substack's #1 Tech Newsletter

After six years managing Uber's payments infrastructure and witnessing pandemic layoffs, Gergely Orosz launched The Pragmatic Engineer on Substack. It hit #1 in tech within four months, crossed one million subscribers in three and a half years, and generates $1.5M+ annually — entirely from reader subscriptions, with zero ads or sponsors.

From Software into Drones: Use the PX4 Architecture Diagram as a Job Map

PX4's own architecture docs say the companion computer runs Linux because 'Linux is a much better platform for general software development than NuttX; there are many more Linux developers.' That sentence is the entry point. The three transition paths differ sharply in friction — CV and MAVLink work on the companion computer transfers almost directly, flight controller firmware means learning RTOS and work-queue constraints, and estimation and control means quaternions and Kalman filters.

ai guide

A Book Written by AI Itself, Teaching You How to Build Software with AI

Encyclopedia of Agentic Coding Patterns catalogues 190 patterns to help you make the right software decisions in the age of AI-written code — and the book itself is autonomously written and maintained by an AI agent.

ai guide

Ticketing Is Dead — Review Is the New Planning

When AI agents can turn intent into a PR in minutes, the bottleneck in software engineering flips from 'planning what to do' to 'evaluating whether the output is correct.' Artifacts of the ticketing era — sprints, story points, backlog grooming — are collapsing to zero, replaced by review as the core practice.