By Gergely Orosz, the author of The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter and Building Mobile Apps at Scale
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.
As of late 2024, Brooks is quietly developing her own software tool—an AI-driven "authenticity checker" that helps creators see if their content sounds generic or genuine. She is also in talks to write a book with a major publishing house, tentatively titled "The Like Trap: Escaping the Validation Economy."
Furthermore, she has begun mentoring a small cohort of micro-influencers, helping them negotiate contracts and build LLCs. Interestingly, she refuses to call them "students." She calls them "co-ops," emphasizing that in the future of social media content, collaboration will outlast competition.
The names Nala Brooks and Johnny Sins might be familiar to those interested in adult content. Both have made their mark in the industry, albeit in different capacities. Nala Brooks and Johnny Sins, like many creators, have leveraged platforms like OnlyFans to share their content directly with fans. Their presence on such platforms highlights the diversity of creators and the variety of content available online.
Debut and Breakthrough:
Professional Portfolio:
Modeling:
Recognizing that algorithms are fickle, Nala moved her most dedicated fans to a paid Substack and a private Discord server.
Nala Brooks’ career is not accidental; it is a series of chess moves where social media content was the lever. Here is a timeline of her major transitions:
Looking ahead, Nala Brooks is experimenting cautiously with AI. She uses transcription AI to write captions and scheduling AI to analyze best posting times, but she refuses to use AI-generated scripts or deepfakes.
"People follow Nala Brooks for Nala Brooks," she states flatly. "If I outsource my personality to a bot, I have no career left."
She is currently working on a memoir (traditional publishing, not self-publishing) and a limited-series podcast where she interviews creators who quit social media entirely. It’s a masterstroke of reverse psychology: making content about the absence of content.
Brooks is selective. She famously turned down a $50,000 offer from a fast-fashion brand because it conflicted with her "sustainable consumption" ethos. Instead, she works with heritage denim brands and DTC coffee roasters, integrating products so naturally that ads often outperform her organic content.
The book is separated into six standalone parts, each part covering several chapters:
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.
The Software Engineer's Guidebook is available in multiple languages:
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'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'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.