Books 📚

Books i’ve read.

2023

• Software Engineering at Google by Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck and Hyrum Wright (1st edition, 2020). This book provides valuable insights into how one of the world’s largest technology companies approaches software development, testing, and maintenance. Written by experienced Google engineers, the book offers practical advice and real-world examples that can help engineers improve their development processes, work more effectively in teams, and build better software. Whether you’re a junior developer or a seasoned software architect, this book is an invaluable resource for anyone looking to improve their software engineering skills and practices. (★★★★)

2022

• Refactoring by Martin Fowler (2nd edition, 1999). This book emphasizes the importance of refactoring for software engineers. It includes a section with code smells and examples of techniques to refactor. This book learned me that “refactoring” should never appear in a schedule. Refactoring is not a user story or a backlog item. Refactoring is not a scheduled task. Refactoring is an immediate and continuous process. It’s simply part of our job as software engineers. Martin recommends that after you start working on a feature or hotfix, and you see any issues with the code, you start refactoring. This book teaches you how you can refactor in a controlled and efficient manner. (★★★☆)
• The Pragmatic Programmer by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas (1999). This is another non-technical book about programming and software engineering. Most of the habits and concepts can feel familiar for people with several years of experience. But having a refresher so you can teach others can still be of value. The book explored good engineering practices and habits that can form the foundation to become a better software developer. (★★★☆)
• Clean Code by Robert C. Martin (2008). This is a book you keep around for the rest of your career. There is so much conversation in Software Engineering around Data structures and Algorithms, optimization and efficiency that are all geared to making great software. However, there isn’t much information about how software engineers can get to the place to write great code. The simple answer is by building great habits. This book defines rules and principles which you could follow to write clean, readable, maintainable, and elegant code. (★★★☆)
• The Ride of a Lifetime by Robert Iger (2021). The book is generally about leadership lessons while he writes the story about his time at Disney. We follow the story in chronically order about how Bob managed to secure the big acquisitions made when he was the CEO of Disney (Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox). A surprising personal touch was his relationship with Steve Jobs, I had no idea how close the two were. What I found particularly arresting is how he worked himself up, from the lower class, over succeeding at ABC to ultimately becoming a CEO at Disney and earning around 66 million US-dollar a year. (★★★★)