Stabilizing a crashing Uber

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Thuan Pham was Uber's first and longest-serving CTO, and today he’s the CTO of Faire, a B2B wholesale platform. Back when Thuan joined Uber, it had around 40 engineers and 30,000 rides per day, and the system crashed multiple times a week. Over seven years, he helped rebuild the system, move it from a monolith to microservices, and scaled the engineering organization behind it. I had the privilege of working with Thuan for four of those seven years. Later, the very first issue of The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter was a deepdive into Uber’s Program and Platform split. This episode of the podcast contains a nice “full circle” moment, where Thuan shares even more details about why Uber chose to embrace that structure.

We discuss what it takes to operate and build in that kind of environment. Thuan explains how he divided his time at Uber into three “tours of duty,” from stabilizing a fragile system, to re-architecting it, and scaling the org.

We go deep into the platform-and-program split, the Helix app rewrite, and what it took to launch Uber in China in just five months (the original estimate was 18 months). We also cover Uber’s in-house tools and explain why they were necessary to support rapid growth.

Finally, we discuss his role today as CTO of Faire, how the company is using AI, and how he sees AI changing software engineering.

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Timestamps

(00:00) Intro

(05:32) Getting into tech

(16:09) The dot-com bust

(20:42) VMware

(26:29) Getting hired by Travis at Uber

(33:22) Early days at Uber and scaling challenges

(40:57) Uber’s China launch

(47:12) The platform and program split

(50:26) From monolith to microservices 

(53:38) Internal tools at Uber 

(57:05) Helix: Uber’s mobile app rewrite

(59:55) Thuan’s email about naming

(1:02:03) Org structure changes under

(1:06:34) Thuan’s work philosophy 

(1:12:23) The “three tours of duty” at Uber

(1:15:37) Why Thuan left Uber 

(1:17:34) Coupang and Nubank

(1:21:59) Faire

(1:25:31) How Faire uses AI

(1:28:24) AI’s impact on software engineering 

(1:31:09) The role of the CTO 

(1:35:13) Career advice

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The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:

• How Uber uses AI for development: inside look

• The Platform and Program split at Uber

• How Uber is measuring engineering productivity

• Inside Uber’s move to the cloud

• Uber's crazy YOLO app rewrite, from the front seat

• How Uber built its observability platform

• Developer experience at Uber with Gautam Korlam

• Uber’s engineering level changes

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