[1/3] The Pragmatic Engineer 2025 Survey (Category DevEx)
I finally got to the summer results of Gergely Orosz’s survey. He is an engineer and the author of The Pragmatic Engineer, an influential technology analysis newsletter. The survey ran among its readers in April–May 2025, with 3k engineers participating. Most were software engineers at companies ranging from startups to big tech; half worked at small companies and half at large ones. This is not a random sample: technical newsletter subscribers may skew towards product technology companies. For example, AWS use is substantially higher and Azure use lower than in traditional enterprise segments. Still, the broad range of roles and companies gives some reason to trust the trends in the data.
Gergely published the findings in three parts, each covering different tools:
1️⃣ Part 1 Respondent demographics; AI use; most-used and best-loved languages; most-loved and most-disliked tools; IDEs and terminals; version control and CI/CD; and IaaS/PaaS cloud platforms.
2️⃣ Part 2 Most-mentioned tools, led by Jira, VS Code and AWS; project management; communication and collaboration tools such as Slack, MS Teams, Confluence, Miro and Figma; databases and storage, including PostgreSQL; backend infrastructure such as Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform and cloud services; and load balancers.
3️⃣ Part 3 Observability, monitoring and logging; on-call and incident management; feature flags, analytics and experimentation; frontend and mobile development; developer utilities; custom internal tools; and enthusiasts’ niche favourites.
Some key findings:
🤖 Widespread AI adoption 85% of engineers use at least one AI-enabled tool at work, such as a coding assistant. Half use GitHub Copilot, making it the most popular tool in its category. Only around 4% deliberately avoid AI, citing company restrictions, lack of effectiveness or ethical concerns. These tools are now widespread in development.
🐍 Popular programming languages TypeScript leads in usage, unsurprisingly given its role in both frontend and backend work. Python, JavaScript, Java, C# and others are also common. Developers rate all major language ecosystems positively; none has a substantial balance of negative feedback. This suggests mature languages: plainly bad choices do not become mainstream. Even niche Elixir reached the top 10 most-loved languages. Ruby on Rails ranked 5th in use and 3rd in affection, reflecting its community’s loyalty. For a sense of that enthusiasm, watch the Rails documentary.
Continued in the next post.
#AI #ML #PlatformEngineering #Software #Architecture #Processes #DevEx #Devops