Addy Osmani

Senior engineering leader and thinker

Addy Osmani is an Irish Software Engineer and leader currently working as a director at Google Cloud AI, focused on helping developers and businesses succeed with Gemini, Vertex AI, and the Agent Development Kit (ADK). After nearly 14 years leading developer experiences in Chrome, where he worked on DevTools, Lighthouse, and Core Web Vitals, he now bridges Google DeepMind, engineering, product, and developer relations teams. A developer for 25+ years at Google, he is passionate about AI-assisted engineering and developer tools. He previously worked on Fortune 500 sites. Addy is the author of a number of books including Learning JavaScript Design Patterns, Leading Effective Engineering Teams, Stoic Mind and Image Optimization. You can try his recent apps.You can find him on LinkedIn, Twitter or TikTok. He's given over 175 talks worldwide. You can find Addy's writing on his blog, Substack and on LeadDev.

Books

Beyond Vibe Coding is a practical guide by Addy Osmani on maintaining code quality in the age of AI-assisted development.

It explores how to treat AI like a junior developer, ensuring that code meets your standards, remains understandable, and aligns with your team's practices. The book covers strategies for avoiding common pitfalls with AI-generated code and emphasizes discipline, testing, and maintainability in modern software workflows.

Effective Software Engineering Management: A practical handbook for leading modern software teams with frameworks for building trust, shaping culture, and connecting execution to business outcomes.

AI-assisted coding and cloud-based tools are already transforming how modern applications are built. Bolt.new, a powerful in-browser AI agent from StackBlitz, streamlines the development process, allowing you to prototype quickly, debug intelligently, and launch confidently—no local setup required. Whether you're new to full stack development or looking to supercharge your workflow, this accessible guide takes you from JavaScript and React fundamentals all the way to deploying sophisticated apps with Bolt.new and StackBlitz. Through real-world projects like a movie explorer and a Supabase-powered workout tracker, you'll master prompt-first development, tap into WebContainers for running backend logic in the browser, and discover a seamless path from idea to deployment. If you're ready to rethink how web apps are built—from the command line to the cloud—this book is your blueprint.

Building Large Scale Web Apps is a toolkit to managing large-scale React applications.

React as a library allows you to start building user interfaces quickly and easily. But how do things scale as an application grows? How do you ensure that your codebase remains manageable, your performance metrics stay on point, and your team continues to work cohesively as the project evolves?

In this book, you'll uncover strategies that industry professionals use to build scalable, performant, and maintainable React applications, all without becoming overwhelmed by complexity.

Leading Effective Engineering Teams - a book of growth tips for engineers, tech leads and managers by Addy Osmani

Do you want to write beautiful, structured, and maintainable JavaScript by applying modern design patterns to the language? Do you want clean, efficient, manageable code? Want to stay up-to-date with the latest best practices? If so, the updated second edition of Learning JavaScript Design Patterns is the ideal place to start.

Author Addy Osmani shows you how to apply modern design patterns to JavaScript and React. That includes popular design patterns such as modules, mixins, observers, and mediators. You'll learn about performance and rendering patterns, such as server-side rendering and islands architecture. You'll also learn how modern architectural patterns—such as MVC, MVP, and MVVM—are useful from the perspective of a modern web application developer. Other essential topics include modern JavaScript syntax and React patterns such as Hooks, higher order components, and render props.

Modern Web Apps - a guide to writing high-performance React web applications by Lydia Hallie and Addy Osmani

Success at Scale is a curated collection of best-practice case studies capturing how production sites of different sizes tackle performance, accessibility, capabilities, and developer experience at scale. Case studies are from industry experts with guidance that stands the test of time.

The Stoic Mind: By Addy Osmani and GoLimitless

In Software Engineering - The Soft Parts Addy Osmani shares lessons from his first 10 years at Google on the soft skills that can help engineers become effective and scale their effectiveness. This guidance should help junior, mid-career and even senior developers move forward, deal with changing technology, and navigate building non-trivial systems. Becoming a good engineer is about collecting experience. Each project, even small ones, is a chance to add new techniques and tools to your toolbox. Where this delivers even more value is when you can solve problems by pairing techniques learned on one project with tools learned working on another. This short book tries to capture what the soft skills are and how they can all add up.

Image Optimization by Addy Osmani. A Smashing Magazine title.

Explore many popular design patterns, including Modules, Observers, Facades, and Mediators. Learn how modern architectural patterns—such as MVC, MVP, and MVVM—are useful from the perspective of a modern web application developer. This book also walks experienced JavaScript developers through modern module formats, how to namespace code effectively, and other essential topics.

Case Studies

eBay

Featured AI articles

The 70% Problem in AI Coding

Maximizing the Human 30%

MCP: The Model Context Protocol

Why I Use Cline for AI Engineering

Leading Engineering Teams in the GenAI Era

Avoiding Skill Atrophy in the Age of AI

Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

What are AI Agents? why do they matter?

Vibe Coding: Revolution or Reckless Abandon?

AI-Driven Prototyping: v0, Bolt, and Lovable Compareda

Featured thoughts

Critical Thinking is key

Overcome team dysfunction

Work is a subset of life

Coach, mentor, sponsor

Effective engineers

Check out more of my thoughts on LinkedIn.

Current projects

I am a director at Google Cloud AI, focused on helping developers and businesses succeed with Gemini, Vertex AI, and the Agent Development Kit (ADK). I bridge Google DeepMind, engineering, product, go-to-market, and developer relations teams. After nearly 14 years leading developer experiences in Chrome, where I worked on DevTools, Lighthouse, and Core Web Vitals, I'm now focused on enterprise AI. I also love side-projects.
Open-source

Projects I've contributed to include Lighthouse, Workbox, Quicklink, Guess.js, Yeoman, HNPWA, TodoMVC, Critical and Material Design Lite. You can find more on GitHub.
Podcasts

I have been on a few different podcasts recently, including PodRocket, Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman, DevDiscuss and Smashing Podcast.
Talks

Recordings of my talks are on my YouTube channel. These include Optimize the Core Web Vitals and Cost Of JavaScript. You can find some of my slides on SpeakerDeck.
Blog

You can find my writing on my blog, Substack and on LeadDev. My last post on here was: Introducing Gemini 3 Flash