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Developer Experience at Uber with Gautam Korlam

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In today’s episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I am joined by former Uber colleague, Gautam Korlam. Gautam is the Co-Founder of Gitar, an agentic AI startup that automates code maintenance. Gautam was mobile engineer no. 9 at Uber and founding engineer for the mobile platform team – and so he learned a few things about scaling up engineering teams.

We talk about:

• How Gautam accidentally deleted Uber’s Java monorepo – really!

• Uber's unique engineering stack and why custom solutions like SubmitQueue were built in-house

• Monorepo: the benefits and downsides of this approach

• From Engineer II to Principal Engineer at Uber: Gautam’s career trajectory

• Practical strategies for building trust and gaining social capital 

• How the platform team at Uber operated with a product-focused mindset

• Vibe coding: why it helps with quick prototyping

• How AI tools are changing developer experience and productivity

• Important skills for devs to pick up to remain valuable as AI tools spread

• And more!

Timestamps

(00:00) Intro

(02:11) How Gautam accidentally deleted Uber’s Java Monorepo

(05:40) The impact of Gautam’s mistake

(06:35) Uber’s unique engineering stack

(10:15) Uber’s SubmitQueue

(12:44) Why Uber moved to a monorepo

(16:30) The downsides of a monorepo

(18:35) Measurement products built in-house 

(20:20) Measuring developer productivity and happiness 

(22:52) How Devpods improved developer productivity 

(27:37) The challenges with cloud development environments

(29:10) Gautam’s journey from Eng II to Principal Engineer

(32:00) Building trust and gaining social capital 

(36:17) An explanation of Principal Engineer at Uber—and the archetypes at Uber 

(45:07) The platform and program split at Uber

(48:15) How Gautam and his team supported their internal users 

(52:50) Gautam’s thoughts on developer productivity 

(59:10) How AI enhances productivity, its limitations, and the rise of agentic AI

(1:04:00) An explanation of Vibe coding

(1:07:34) An overview of Gitar and all it can help developers with 

(1:10:44) Top skills to cultivate to add value and stay relevant

(1:17:00) Rapid fire round

The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:

The Platform and Program split at Uber

How Uber is measuring engineering productivity

Inside Uber’s move to the Cloud

How Uber built its observability platform

Software Architect Archetypes

See the transcript and other references from the episode at ⁠⁠https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/podcast⁠⁠

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