👋 Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover topics related to Big Tech and startups through the lens of engineering managers and senior engineers.

Most videogame stories are power fantasies. You spend your time getting ever stronger, ever tougher, ever more formidable as you accumulate experience points, gold, and equipment. Obstacles aren’t things to go around; they’re things you go through.

There’s a ruin of what some believe to be a pagan Roman church in the garden of a private residence, in a very small town just south of Rome, whose stone stairs leading to its alleged former altar are so completely worn through in the center that they resemble what a stick of butter looks like if

I never intended to make videogames about my brother. He died in May last year, standing in the crowded lobby of the Manchester Arena, at the hands of the radicalised young man who’d walked into the building and detonated a homemade explosive.

How to Raise a Boy is a weeklong series centered around this urgent question in the era of Parkland, President Trump, and #MeToo. My dad left us when I was 2, owing to a drug habit he wouldn’t or couldn’t break.