Learn Software Engineering From an Ex-Palantir Engineering Director
Plus: Why a rising junior chose STEM at UATX.
What should a software engineering course look like in 2026?
According to Andy Aymeloglu, nothing like the one you’d have taken 25 years ago.
This is the first class of his spring 2026 course at UATX, and it’s now online for anyone to watch.
Andy Aymeloglu was Director of Engineering at Palantir Technologies from 2005 to 2015, growing it from a fledgling company to an 1,800-person company with offices across the globe. He has since served as VP of Engineering at Hexagon Bio, Alcor member, and Founding Partner at Commit Capital, while advising startups in the Bay Area.
The course picks up where two prior courses in programming fundamentals and data structures left off. Andy’s core argument: coding agents belong in the workflow, treated as a supervised pair programmer rather than a novelty. In this opening session he gets specific about what agents are genuinely good at, where they get sloppy, and how to think about vibe coding. From there he introduces client-server architecture, the model underpinning nearly every modern app, and walks through the full tech stack students will use all term.
00:00 — Introduction
01:19 — Course overview
03:01 — How UATX teaches software engineering
06:27 — Defining and using AI agents
10:37 — AI coding horror stories
11:52 — Are you truly vibe coding?
15:40 — Most web apps exhibit client-server architecture
17:35 — The tech stack for this course
20:44 — User interface and user experience
23:35 — The backend is where most of your business logic will live
25:30 — The class Andy wishes he had paid attention to
27:32 — How code communicates
31:00 — Carrying projects over the finish line
35:05 — A crucial tool
35:45 — Ways to think about testing
38:58 — Discussing coding agents
50:12 — Install a coding agent and make sure it works
50:47 — Linux is better for deploying to the cloud
52:36 — The Unix philosophy
53:07 — Why you should learn the CLI
55:08 — Looking ahead
Rising Junior Eitan Zarin on Why He Chose STEM at UATX
Join Eitan at UATX:
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Lmao! Spend lots of money to learn what I can learn on my own online. But for argument’s sake, say I did learn software engineering from you? Would I find a job since I’ll be competing with the whole 3rd world outdoor shitting population of India? And if I do get a job, how long will I have it before I’m laid off? Go f*ck yourselves. Spend your time changing our laws to make sure AMERICANS get AMERICAN jobs.
Weirdly, the Eitan Zarin video will not start to play until I've started the other video. Happened in both Chrome and Microsoft Edge.