2019 Summer Reading List: Our Top Recommendations
Summertime is often considered vacation time. Last year, we asked our engineers what books they recommend to read on vacation. And you know what they say, new summer season, new book list!
Take a look and let us know which books you’d recommend!
- Skunk Works, A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed, Ben R. Rich, Leo Janos
“This is a book about planes. Some of the best planes ever made. It’s also a book about the engineering endeavor: the theory, the practice, the economics and politics, the team and the impact of those planes in the world.”
— Recommended by Pedro Borges, Lead Software Engineer
2. Brick by Brick, How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry, David C. Robertson, Bill Breen
“Brick by Brick tells the history of LEGO, from a carpenter shop in rural Denmark to the hands of kids and grown-ups all over the world. It tells the story of how it almost bankrupted at the beginning of the century, and how it had to reinvent the innovation rule book to become one of the world’s most profitable and fast-growing companies.”
— Recommended by João Valentim, Principal Software Architect
3. The Digital Mind How Science Is Redefining Humanity, Arlindo Oliveira
“The Digital Mind is a captivating introduction to how ongoing technological developments in neurobiology, bioengineering, computing power, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are creating the potential for significative and disruptive changes in society as well as in our day-to-day. We live in a time of exciting and accelerated change, and this book sheds some light upon pressing questions such as what is the nature of conscience and if it will ever be possible for a mind to exist outside of a biological brain. Even if many of these advancements are still very far away, I find it fascinating to consider the ethical, economic, sociological, and philosophical issues that these changes can bring.”
— Recommended by Paulo Ribeiro, Lead Technical Writer
4. Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable…About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business, Patrick Lencioni
“Death by meeting is a compelling fable about one of the most hated things in your work life, meetings. The book hooks you into an irresistible story loaded with powerful insights that you can put in practice daily.”
— Recommended by João Guerra, Senior UX Designer
5. Project to Product, Mik Kersten
“I read this book because I wanted to understand the Flow Framework and the concept of the value stream network. OutSystems is product-oriented, and we know that the product value chain involves different teams — engineering and other departments — so I wanted to know how I could have a global vision to track the flow of business value in software delivery and correlate the product’s value stream with business results.”
— Recommended by Miguel Costa Antunes, Software Engineering Manager
6. Design for How People Think, John Whalen
“The book “Design for how people think” is very hands-on. It doesn’t matter if you are a product manager, a developer or a designer, you can learn to define and build a brilliant experience for your users. This book is a tool to help us understand users needs and perspectives.
John Whalen is a PhD in Cognitive Science with almost two decades of experience as a User-Centered Designer, and he touches upon and meshes together psychology, design thinking and lean startup techniques in his work.”
— Recommended by Andreia Mesquita, UX/UI Team Lead
7. The Phoenix Project, Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford
“The Phoenix Project is a very interesting book about DevOps and the importance of having Devs and Ops collaborating. It introduces DevOps in three ways: systems thinking, amplifying feedback loops and a culture of continual experimentation and learning. This is a fundamental (and funny) read to better understand the importance of DevOps in IT organizations, and how to improve collaboration, while removing inefficiencies and bottlenecks to achieve a common goal.”
— Recommended by Diogo Oliveira, Senior Software Engineer
8. Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself, Wes Bush
“The idea behind “Product-Led Growth” is to have a product that is designed to sell itself, instead of being too dependent on a sales machine. So instead of marketing qualified leads, you end up having product qualified leads. That’s what companies like Slack, Dropbox, Atlassian, and HubSpot are doing.”
— Recommended by Vasco Pessanha, Product Manager
To mix it up a little, we’re also sharing a fiction book suggestion for this summer!
9. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
“I chose The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy because it’s a trilogy in three, then four, later five and now six books. You were taught to believe that trilogies should consist of 3 things that are connected, much in the same way that people who can’t live without bureaucracy and processes believe they will die if they can’t have bureaucracy. Well, the universe is immense and vastly absurd, and being in control is merely an illusion that can disappear on a whim just because someone needs to build a bypass, and humans are the third most intelligent species on a sphere 70% covered in water, appropriately named earth. Let that sink in… If a book written by beings from all across the galaxy contains “Don’t Panic” written in large friendly letters on the cover and asks you to always carry a towel, that sounds like good advice to me!”
— Recommended by Ricardo Marques, Software Engineering Manager
Happy reading!
