2021 booksAs with many things 2021 didn't quite go to plan with my reading. There were too many distractions in the first half of the year, but I got some reading time in the second half. The lack of holidays, flying and commuting didn't really help overall. As always this is a mix of light fiction and books related to work, which this year mostly means management. ...
2020 was a bit unexpected to say the least. Here is a quick review from my perspective.This is the second year we are living in the countryside and hour from Barcelona and over the year it turned out to have been a pretty good decision. JanuaryPretty uneventful. I mostly cycled indoors and met the BRCG crew once for a longer ride. A storm hit Spain and led to a bit of damage on our house. ...
goodreads books 2020 You would think a global pandemic would be good for your reading habit. This doesn't seem to be the case for me. I am not sure where the time I spent on commute went, but definitely not towards some good use. This list is kind of in order, but also grouped by author and series. ...
The Phoenix Project Someone recommended this to me and I got it for free on Kindle, so I thought I give it a go. I kind of like the concept of a novelized version of a DevOps book. I also liked the main characters and the general setup. It seemed a bit weird that a lot of best practices are completely unknown in the fictional company, but I guess this might also exist in the real world. For most of the book I was question myself why I would even read it, it is close enough to what I had to deal with in some of my jobs and I don't really find my life exciting enough to be made into a book. One of the problems I see is how rapid change is shown in the book. A very large company is turned around in less than a year and this is even managed in spite of the awful internal company politics. The Unicorn Project After reading The Phoenix Project I thought I give this one a try to see the other side of the fictional company. The Unicorn Project is the developers view of The Phoenix Project, the timelines overlap and some characters are also shared. That being said, I found the main character of this book super annoying. Apparently she is "really, really good" and keeps repeating this a few times. There is even half a chapter, which just describes how "really, really good" she is. Getting through the book with her as the central character was painful. As the first book, this one is also a long list of best practices put into a story. In this book it is put to the extreme though. And there is no reality where all of these could be applied in the short time-frame of the book. If you are interested into a novelization of a developers life I would suggest to just read The Phoenix Project and skip this one. On Goodreads The Phoenix Project The Unicorn Project
When I wrote the review of The Manager’s Path I started to think about other books I wish I had read earlier. Usually these triggered some kind of change in how I approach my work or life. This list is definitely incomplete and I will add more to the goodreads list at the bottom of this post. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change by Kent Beck I still remember when and where I read this for the first time. It was on a plane from the US OSCON back to London where I had my start-up. Up to that point all of our projects where waterfall and we basically had no unit tests in our code. On the plane I decided we had to do major changes and we did these over the next years. I was still pretty inexperienced in leading a team, but this was one step into the right direction. By now most of the things mentioned in the book, like pair programming, small cycles, unit testing, agility are well used and documented. This small book is probably still worth a read. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity This book is one of the ones where the solution is so obvious that a one page summary would probably enough. Nonetheless this is a good book and gave me a better idea about organizing myself. I am using a mix of the paper approach for all the paper one still receives and Todoist for everything else. In the end it is just a form of Kanban or Inbox Zero. It doesn't matter how you manage your tasks, just keep your work in progress small and your tasks prioritized. Web Operations: Keeping the Data On Time A collection of essays and interviews that gave me lots of ideas about DevOps and that side of a company in general. I still use it as a reference for things like post mortems. Because these are mostly stories it is an easy read and you don't have to read the book in sequence, just pick the ones that you find most interesting. Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity Mostly interesting and inspiring because I am so hopeless bad at this. As an introvert the idea of being candid and even worse radical candid seems absurd. But I know it is one of the areas I have to work on and the book gave me new ideas in a nice form. It is a bit long though and does repeat the main points over and over again. The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses I am not working at a start-up any more, neither am I on the business side. I just wish we had this in my time in London. We would have avoided a lot of pain and would probably be still around now. Implementing this in an existing setting is a lot harder unless you have buy in from the top. The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change A great book for engineers transitioning to management. Another book I would have loved to have had at my start-up, thankfully it didn't exist back then. My review of The Manager's Path. Definitely worth reading for all developers even if you don't plan to go into management. I wish I read this earlier Web Operations: Keeping the Data On Time by John Allspaw Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change by Kent Beck Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Malone Scott The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change by Camille Fournier Share book reviews and ratings with Christof, and even join a book club on Goodreads.