[2/3] The Pragmatic Engineer 2025 Survey (Category DevEx)
Continuing my discussion of Gergely’s survey, let us look at the remaining topics.
❤🔥 Development tools: love and hate Surprisingly, Jira topped the list of most-used tools, ahead even of VS Code and AWS. It was also the most hated: developers dislike its slowness and bulk. Its lighter competitor Linear was among the most-loved tools, at number 4, and engineers see it as a desirable replacement. Together, they account for 75% of project-management tool mentions. Jira dominates in large companies and Linear in small ones.
✈ Team communication and collaboration Established tools lead: Slack is the most-used development chat, while Microsoft Teams is the most common choice for video calls. Confluence leads for documentation, Miro for collaborative brainstorming, and Figma for interface design. Developers mentioned Figma even more often than a specialist tool such as K8s. That points to development teams’ deep involvement in UX/UI design and close collaboration with designers.
😶🌫️ Cloud platforms The survey confirms Amazon Web Services’ clear lead: around 44% of respondents use AWS, compared with roughly 30% for its nearest competitor, Microsoft Azure. Google Cloud Platform accounts for the remaining approximately 26%.
🐘 Infrastructure and databases Docker containers and the K8s orchestrator are used almost everywhere, making them the de facto application-deployment standard. Terraform leads infrastructure as code. Managed cloud services, for example from AWS, are also widely used for common backend tasks. PostgreSQL is the clear favorite for storage, mentioned by 1/3 of respondents. Still, the database landscape is extremely diverse: people named dozens of SQL, NoSQL, NewSQL, and specialized stores. Teams choose databases for their particular needs, creating a very heterogeneous data stack.
♾️ Monitoring and reliability (DevOps) Datadog, Grafana, and Sentry are the most popular observability platforms, each used by roughly 15–25% of respondents. Respectively a cloud monitoring service, an open-source dashboard system, and an error-tracking service, they are familiar parts of many teams’ infrastructure. Most engineers use established tools such as PagerDuty and OpsGenie for alerts and incident response.
📱 Frontend and mobile technologies A few frameworks dominate. React leads frontend development with little competition and is mentioned by most web developers; Next.js is the most popular React meta-framework. React Native leads cross-platform mobile development, appearing far more often than alternatives. Most teams’ frontend stacks therefore look similar in 2025. Backends are more varied, though many use a unified TypeScript/Node.js stack or popular frameworks such as .NET and Spring.
🎌 Feature flags and internal tools Feature flags and A/B testing are established practices. Many teams use ready-made services, especially LaunchDarkly. Yet companies also frequently build their own feature-flag systems, experimentation platforms, and deployment pipelines. Existing products may not fully meet their needs, or they may want to save on licensing or satisfy security requirements.
I will draw conclusions from the survey in the final post.
#AI #ML #PlatformEngineering #Software #Architecture #Processes #DevEx #Devops