Resharing some recommendations that I sent to a friend in 2022. I haven’t updated the list below since, but you can find my StoryGraph reading list here.
Books that’ve been important to my learning and professional development. Listing in order of publishing, rather than date read, to get a sense of how ideas might have evolved:
- 1984: 📚 the goal
- The Goal helped me to understand more about the theory of constraints, after reading 📚 the phoenix project.
- 1999: The Pragmatic Programmer
- This book introduced me to the idea of architectural and design patterns in programming, and the importance of pragmatism in using those patterns depending on the context.
- 2013: 📚 the phoenix project
- The Phoenix Project introduced me to DevOps and a set of principles called the three ways which (several years after reading) is a foundation of how I approach & try to communicate product and team development. This book also indirectly introduced me to the Theory of Constraints which helps me to reason about complex systems and prioritise improvements.
- 2016: 📚 the devops handbook
- 2017: 2021-11-14-book-building-evolutionary-architectures
- Building Evolutionary Architectures taught me about the relationship between business goals → product architecture → system architecture. Also how to develop adaptive teams and systems, and ideas to measure and communicate their effectiveness.
- 2018: 📚 accelerate
- Accelerate gave me a framework to understand and communicate more clearly about software and engineering team performance with leadership and other internal stakeholders.