By Gergely Orosz, the author of The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter and Building Mobile Apps at Scale

Assassin 39s Creed Odyssey Trainer 156 Hot · Editor's Choice

Navigating senior, tech lead, staff and principal positions at tech companies and startups. An Amazon #1 Best Seller. New: the hardcover is out! As is the audibook. Now available in 6 languages.

The Software Engineer's Guidebook

What's Inside

Part 1: Developer Career Fundamentals

1. Career paths
2. Owning your career
3. Performance reviews
4. Promotions
5. Thriving in different environments
6. Switching jobs

Part 2: The Competent Software Developer

7. Getting things done
8. Coding
9. Software development
10. Tools of the productive engineer

Part 3: The Well-Rounded Senior Engineer

11. Getting things done
12. Collaboration and teamwork
13. Software engineering
14. Testing
15. Software architecture

Part 4: The Pragmatic Tech Lead

16. Project management
17. Shipping in production
18. Stakeholder management
19. Team structure
20. Team dynamics

Part 5: Role-Model Staff and Principal Engineers

21. Understanding the business
22. Collaboration
23. Software engineering
24. Reliable software engineering
25. Software architecture

Further reading: online, bonus chapters

Bonus #1: for Part 1
Bonus #2: for Part 2
Bonus #3: for Part 3
Bonus #4: for Part 4
Bonus #5: for Part 5
See more details for each chapter in the extended table of contents for the book.

Assassin 39s Creed Odyssey Trainer 156 Hot · Editor's Choice

Months later, a procession of cloaked figures arrived at Arya’s door—men and women who had lost everything to the city’s lords. They came asking for the Trainer. One by one Arya told them the truth: that the machine demanded something no coin could replace, that it took mornings, laughter, the unremarkable smallness that stitches a life together. Some went away and waited; others returned with hollow eyes and an easy, hungry grin and were turned away.

Here’s a short, original story inspired by the phrase "assassin 39s creed odyssey trainer 156 hot." I've turned that into a sci‑fi/fantasy adventure—concise and self-contained. In the city of Iskhar, where stone terraces spiraled like the rings of a shell and skyships hummed between towers, rumors moved faster than the wind. They whispered of a relic called the Trainer of 156 Suns—an impossible machine said to fold time into muscle and teach its bearer to move as if danger were already past. Hunters sought it. Kings feared it. The dead did not speak of it.

Arya took it. She understood that some tools are not meant to be wielded often. She wrapped it in cloth and hid it in a seam beneath her workbench where the city’s heartbeat thudded nearest. assassin 39s creed odyssey trainer 156 hot

Word of a new kind of assassin slipped into the city like an idea. The governors grew uneasy. The underground markets hummed with curiosity. Talir became a legend in alleys and a rumor among noble houses—an assassin who struck with uncanny certainty, then left without explanation. People spoke of him with a mixture of fear and gratitude; sometimes he killed tyrants, sometimes he took contracts that cleaned brigand camps. Always, he moved like a man who had seen many futures and chosen one cleanly.

Weeks became a pattern: at dawn Arya took Talir through courtyards and scaffolds, teaching him to read angles and anticipate weight; at night they traced the Trainer’s legend in faded manuscripts. He learned to move without announcing himself, to breathe in rhythms that matched the city’s pulse. Each lesson was a small hunt, each correction a rebirth. Months later, a procession of cloaked figures arrived

“You can find it,” he said. “You can repair more than leather. You know the old paths. The city listens to you.”

When they finally found the Trainer, it sat like a heart in a ruined observatory, girded in bronze filigree etched with numbers and constellations. Its surface was warm under Talir’s hand—hot, almost living, as if it had been waiting for 156 lifetimes to be touched. Some went away and waited; others returned with

They followed clues folded into the margins of old maps: a name scratched onto a wall by a child decades ago, a merchant’s ledger pointing to an abandoned amphitheater, the whisper of a woman who traded memories for bread. Each step drew them deeper into Iskhar’s forgotten half—where the sun barely reached and the lights of surface life were myths.

How to Read the Book

The book is separated into six standalone parts, each part covering several chapters:

  • Part 1: Developer career fundamentals
  • Part 2: The competent software developer
  • Part 3: The well-rounded senior engineer
  • Part 4: The pragmatic tech lead
  • Part 5: Role-model staff and principal engineers
  • Part 6: Conclusion

Parts 1 and 6 apply to all engineering levels: from entry-level software developers to principal or above engineers. Parts 2, 3, 4 and 5 cover increasingly senior engineering levels. These four parts group topics in chapters – such as ones on software engineering, collaboration, getting things done, and so on.

This book is more of a reference book that you can refer back to, as you grow in your career. I suggest skimming over the career levels and chapters that you are familiar with, and focus reading on topics you struggle with, or career levels where you are aiming to get to. Keep in mind that expectations can vary greatly between companies.

In this book, I’ve aimed to align the topics and leveling definitions closer to what is typical at Big Tech and scaleups: but you might find some of the topics relevant for lower career levels in later chapters. For example, we cover logging, montiroing and oncall in Part 5: “Reliable software systems” in-depth: but it’s useful – and oftentimes necessary! – to know about these practices below the staff engineer levels.

Assassin 39s Creed Odyssey Trainer 156 Hot · Editor's Choice

Paperback
  • For most countries, buy the hardcover or softcover from Amazon:
  • Buy on Amazon
  • Other sites to buy it on:
  • Buy directly from the publisher in India; also shipping to Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Maldives:
  • Buy from Shroff Publishers
  • Unable to order the book in your country? Please share details here and I'll aim to remedy the situation.
eBook
Audibook

Translations

The Software Engineer's Guidebook is available in multiple languages:

Assassin 39s Creed Odyssey Trainer 156 Hot · Editor's Choice

The book doesn't ship to my location, or shipping is silly expensive off Amazon.

You should now be able to ask your local book shops to order the book for you via Ingram Spark Print-on-demand - using the ISBN code 9789083381824. I'm also working on making the paperback more accessible in additional regions, including translated versions. Please share details here if you're unable to get the book in your country and I'll aim to remedy the situation.

I'm an engineering manager. Is the book useful to me?

I'd like to think so! The book can help you get ideas on how to help software engineers on your team grow. And if you are a hands-on engineering manager (which I hope you might be!) then you can apply the topics yourself! I wrote more about staying hands-on as an engineering manager or lead in The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter.

I'm not a software engineer. Is the book useful to me?

I've gotten this variation of a question from Data Engineers, ML Engineers, designers and SREs. See the more detailed table of contents and the "Look inside" sample to get a better idea of the contents of the book. I have written this book with software engineers as the target group, and the bulk of the book applies for them. Part 1 is more generally applicable career advice: but that's still smaller subset of the book.

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About the Author

I've been a software engineer for a decade — working at JP Morgan, Skype/Microsoft, Skyscanner and Uber — and then an engineering manager for another several years.

As an engineering manager, I did my best to support people on my team to improve professionally, get the promotions they deserved, and give clear, actionable feedback when I thought colleagues weren’t ready for the next level, just yet.

As my team grew and I took on skip-level reports, I had less and less time to mentor teammates in-depth. I also started to see patterns in the feedback I gave, so began to publish blog posts of the advice I found myself giving repeatedly; about writing well, and doing good code reviews. These posts were warmly received, and a lot more people than I expected read and shared them with colleagues. This is when I began writing this book.

The book took four years to write. By year two of the writing process, I had a draft that could be ready to publish. However, at that time I launched The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. The focus of this newsletter is keeping the pulse of today’s tech market, plus regular deepdives into how well-known, international companies operate, software engineering trends, and occasional interviews with interesting tech people. Writing the newsletter made me realize just how many “gaps” were in the book draft. The past two years have been spent rewriting and honing its contents, one chapter at a time.

Today, The Pragmatic Newsletter is the #1 technology newsletter on Substack — with more than 500,000 readers. The newsletter has helped me improve the book; I’ve learned lots about interesting trends and new tools that feel like they are here to stay for a decade or longer, such as AI coding tools, cloud development environments, and developer portals. These technologies are referenced in this book in much less detail than you will find in the newsletter.

I hope you discover useful ideas in this book, which serve you well for years to come.

Follow me on Linkedin, or on Twitter at @GergelyOrosz.

The links to books on this site (including to my book!) are affiliate ones. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.