2024

Books

Videos

Articles

2023

Books

Slides

  • Why Cloud Zombies Are Destroying the Planet and How You Can Stop Them: Absolutely fantastic. Turn it off! LightSwitchOps - turning off and back on again should be easy and just work. Don’t make it hard for people to get servers - they won’t give them back! (Attachment.)
  • An incredible slide deck from a project manager on the Return to Monkey Island game team: So good!
    • A link to the gdc talk which was also excellent
    • Talk summary : Gain production insights from Return to Monkey Island’s lead producer, Jenn Sandercock, about the two-year development cycle, working with an iconic IP, and building a no-crunch, fully remote team of 25 people in absolute secrecy. Learn the skills that allowed Return to Monkey Island to be completely playable within the first four months of development and the iterative process that followed.This talk is not a postmortem. It’s a shipload of production-focused tips and techniques in small, digestible, rapid-fire, and actionable nuggets. All the tips will come with detailed, concrete examples of how we implemented them. Jenn will share internal Notion databases of tasks and art assets, cutscene pipeline details, meeting essentials, remote team building ideas like watercoolers, and more.
  • WHY EVERY SOFTWARE ENGINEERING INTERVIEW SHOULD INCLUDE OPS QUESTIONS: We all are responsible for keeping production in good shape.

Articles

  • Influence: Lessons from a Staff Engineer and ex-Twitter 8-year Tech Lead: Aligns very well with how I think about working with others, well written. Will probably re-read this from time to time to help me remember.
  • Questions for a new technology: Love these. There should be some friction to adding a new technology to a team / system. Ongoing maintenance and operational burn trumps dev cost:
    1. What problem are we trying to solve? (Tech should never be introduced as an end to itself)
    2. How could we solve the problem with our current tech stack? (If the answer is we can’t, then we probably haven’t thought about the problem deeply enough)
    3. Are we clear on what new costs we are taking on with the new technology? (monitoring, training, cognitive load, etc)
    4. What about our current stack makes solving this problem in a cost-effective manner (in terms of money, people or time) difficult?
    5. If this new tech is a replacement for something we currently do, are we committed to moving everything to this new technology in the future? Or are we proliferating multiple solutions to the same problem? (aka “Will this solution kill and eat the solution that it replaces?”)
    6. Who do we know and trust who uses this tech? Have we talked to them about it? What did they say about it? What don’t they like about it? (if they don’t hate it, they haven’t used it in depth yet)
    7. What’s a low risk way to get started?
    8. Have you gotten a mixed discipline group of senior folks together and thrashed out each of the above points? Where is that documented?
  • 12 factor app: Good practices here in terms of architecting and operating an application.
  • Gov.uk design system: A thorough guide to designing web applications / pages that are accessible and consistent. Very well put together and thought through.
  • Above the Line, Below the Line: So many good ideas here.
    • Mental model is often not quite right because the system is changing constantly
    • Collaborative effort is needed to operate systems
    • People and views of a system work above a line of representations (different points of view of status / state)
    • A system includes the people that operate it - not just the code
  • Jakob’s 10 Usability Heuristics: Beautiful presentation of important ideas
  • Delivery Hero’s Reliability Manifesto
  • 10 technical strategies to avoid when scaling your startup (and 5 to embrace): I’m sure I’ve bookmarked this before, but it’s just so good.

2022

Books

  • Sandman Audio Book Part 3, Neil Gaiman
  • Elder Races, Adrian Tchaikovsky
  • The Golden Enclaves, Naomi Novik
  • Systems Performance, Brendan Gregg
  • The Line of Illeniel, Michael Manning
  • The Blacksmith’s Son, Michael Manning
  • The Wizard’s Crown, Michael Manning
  • The Kaiju Preservation Society
  • Interview with the Robot

Articles

  • Best Practice: Application Frameworks: Great article that talks about why frameworks. Benefits vs tradeoffs. I need to re-read this!
  • OpenTelemetry and the Ghost of Provisioning Past: In which Amy talks about the road to opentelemetry in a system she was tasked with bringing better observability to. Quite the journey. Bit of a reminder to me that there is a cost to a migration like this. (Hopefully not always as painful as this story but certainly non-zero.)
  • Microservices to macro: This sounds right to me. I guess we don’t really want microservices per se. What we want is to be able to safely deploy new code / bug fixes whenever we want, and we’d like to be able to tell whether our code is healthy or not.
    • “Microservices are hard!”
  • Coordination avoidance: Scaling out a distributed system is achieved by breaking up work and can be done with replication, sharding, caching and possibly other things I can’t think of now or remember. Something I would not consider is the gains related to avoiding the cost of coordination altogether!

Videos

2021

Some of these are audiobooks if the performance is well done and the rest I’m usually reading on a Kindle. Turning to audiobooks more and more as their production values just continue to go up!

  • Cytonic, Book 3 of Skyward series
  • The Sandman Act 2
  • Sufficiently Advanced Magic, Book 1: I had to put this series down in book 2. It’s like looking over the shoulder of somebody playing a video game like diablo and speaking out every thought and detail of ever mouse click. Over and over and over …
  • Release It! 2nd Edition
  • How to Avoid a Climate Disaster
  • Taming Thymeleaf: I liked it. Very practical guide to building a webapp from the frontend to backend with security and persistence using spring boot and related modules. Will be a good reference I’m thinking.

Art of the Adept Series, Michael G Manning

  • The Choice of Magic, Book 1
  • Secrets and Spellcraft, Book 2
  • Scholar of Magic, Book 3
  • Disciple of War, Book 4

The Scholomance Series, Naomi Novik

  • A Deadly Education, Book 1
  • The Last Graduate, Book 2

Articles

Books

  • Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir
  • Rhythm of War, Brandon Sanderson
  • How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Bill Gates

2020

Books

  • Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
  • Software Engineering at Google
  • Building Secure and Reliable Systems
  • A Mark of Kings
  • Hello World, Hannah Fry
  • Renegades, Marissa Meyer
  • The Sandman Audible Studios Production, Neil Gaiman. This was an incredible full cast production, writing to be performed in a radio program type format. So good. I hope another is on the way
  • The Goblin Emperor. Very much enjoyed this one. There’s just the one book (I often prefer my fantasy reading to involve epic story arcs and multiple thick books! :)). Listen to the audiobook from audible. The narator was excellent

Videos

Articles

  • The 25 greatest Java apps ever written: Just a great romp through 25 years of a programming language, and platform that helped power the world through a period of rapid change. Lots of neat things in here I remember poking at personally. Really great 🙂
  • The UX of Lego Panels: UX design principles, and lego. Amazing!
  • Priority Guides: Alternative to wireframes for documenting user interfaces, goals, user research that avoids getting too caught up on interactions and aesthetics. Definitely seems to favour content and context
  • 4+1 Architectural View Model: Concisely model a system taking into account several different, but useful! perspectives

2019

  • Being Mortal, Atul Gawande
  • Educated, Tara Westover
  • Skyward, Brandon Sanderson
  • The Box, Marc Levinson
  • Stumbling On Happiness, Daniel Gilbert
  • Head on, John Scalzi (Book 2: The Lock In Series)
  • The Legion and the Lioness (World Apart #1)
  • Data and Goliath
  • Supernova in the East I & II, Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History Podcast
  • Effective Java : I figured a quick skim of this was worthwhile since I’m starting to work in Java again. It was a great read back in the day and has even been updated a bit for more recent versions of the language!
  • Shogun
  • Starsight
  • The Unicorn Project

2018

  • How F’cked Up is Your Management by Johnathan and Melissa Nightingale
  • Mars Rover Curiosity: An Inside Account from Curiosity’s Chief Engineer by Rob Manning & William L. Simon

2017

  • The Manager’s Path by Camille Fournier
  • Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull
  • An Astronaut’s Guide to Life by Chris Hadfield

Favourite articles