Bookshelf April 2018
Here’s what’s in my reading and review queue. Please leave your book recommendations in the comments.
Release It! Second Edition (2018)
A single dramatic software failure can cost a company millions of dollars — but can be avoided with simple changes to design and architecture. This new edition of the best-selling industry standard shows you how to create systems that run longer, with fewer failures, and recover better when bad things happen. New coverage includes DevOps, microservices, and cloud-native architecture. Stability antipatterns have grown to include systemic problems in large-scale systems. This is a must-have pragmatic guide to engineering for production systems.
This is my favorite in the list. The first edition changed how I thought about building software systems. Hopefully the second edition is updated to be less Java centric (I think the edition over 20 years old now!) and more inline with the modern tech landscape. Out now on PragProg.
The Toyota Kata (2009)
This game-changing book puts you behind the curtain at Toyota, providing new insight into the legendary automaker’s management practices and offering practical guidance for leading and developing people in a way that makes the best use of their brainpower.
I’ve come across this book multiple times while reading about DevOps and IT performance. Toyota’s successful approach to manufacturing has influenced DevOps thinking. Time to see for myself what’s going on inside Toyota. Pick it up on Amazon.
Software Design X-Rays (2018)
Are you working on a codebase where cost overruns, death marches, and heroic fights with legacy code monsters are the norm? Battle these adversaries with novel ways to identify and prioritize technical debt, based on behavioral data from how developers work with code. And that’s just for starters. Because good code involves social design, as well as technical design, you can find surprising dependencies between people and code to resolve coordination bottlenecks among teams. Best of all, the techniques build on behavioral data that you already have: your version-control system. Join the fight for better code!
I don’t know what expect from this book. I haven’t heard this approach to managing technical debt so that’s intriguing. If there’s a method based on data in SCM that can break bottlenecks and improve team performance than I’m all for it. Out now from PragProg.
Building Evolutionary Architecture (2017)
The software development ecosystem is constantly changing, providing a constant stream of new tools, frameworks, techniques, and paradigms. Over the past few years, incremental developments in core engineering practices for software development have created the foundations for rethinking how architecture changes over time, along with ways to protect important architectural characteristics as it evolves. This practical guide ties those parts together with a new way to think about architecture and time.
I picked up this book because I heard Neal Ford discuss architecture on some podcast. He spoke eloquently about, a topic close to my heart, software architecture. I’m curious what wisdom he and the co-authors put into book form. Picked it up from O’Reilly.
The Art of Monitoring (2017)
A hands-on introductory book on the art of modern application and infrastructure monitoring and metrics.
I don’t usually go for technical tutorial books, but this one caught my attention. It leverages Riemann to build a complete telemetry solution. Hopefully this book fills the gap around building monitoring setups (especially Riemann). I trust James Turnbull to deliver. Buy directly from the author and support independent authors.
The Lean Startup (2011)
The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.
This is another seminal book in building successful business with the lean approach. I’m not too familar with Lean, so hopefully this book makes Lean concrete. Buy from Amazon.
