bookreview

API by Design. This book is focused on REST APIs and introduces ways to measure complexity and some techniques to tame complexity. If you’ve ever worked on a REST API adversely impacted your WTFs/minute, this is a good book to consider. What I liked: introducing new ways to communicate complexity, like Reference Entanglement (APIs with excessive references or arbitrary counts of nested resources). I also liked the section that quantified complexity based on optional parameters....

Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations. I feel like Accelerate was an OK book. I picked this book up after seeing it recommended from Charity’s blog. I was hopeful for some mind blowing content, but it mostly provided confirmation of some truths I’ve encountered in industry a decade ago. What I liked: Research-backed conclusions about engineering methodologies. The book provides a reader some vocabulary, techniques, research, and links to business outcomes....

Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time. I feel like this book gets less fanfare than the Google SRE books but it’s just as valuable. Like Google’s SRE books, this book has a mixture of useful information, wonderful explanations, and Google-flavored navel gazing. What I liked: the first 16 chapters or so had me really engaged. I especially enjoyed the author’s clear definition of software engineering vs....

Some days I feel that I’ve returned to my old DBA role, well… sort of. A lot of my day to day work revolves around a vast amount of data and applications for data storage and retrieval. I haven’t been a DBA by trade since 2011, nearly an eternity in the tech industry. To me, Designing Data-Intensive Applications was a wonderful survey of “What’s changed?” as well as “What’s still useful?...