Software Engineering at Google. Curated by Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, and Hyrum Wright. Available free online. A collection of essays from Googlers on software engineering at Google. I’m guessing that some of this was more aspirational and potentially “best of” rather than “all of”. Some of it lines up very well with what I believe in and advocate for. There were some (quiet) ThoughtWorks engagements with Google back in the day and I’ve always wondered how much influence that had. This was published back in 2020 so also unclear how much has changed since then, for better or worse.
Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson. Claire was previously the COO at Stripe and a VP at Google. This summarises the lessons she learned about how to run larger scale organizations. Gets into the practical details of senior leadership activities that tends to be missing from more abstract books. I don’t necessarily agree with everything here but it’s a useful example from real experiences.
Wiring the Winning Organization by Gene Kim and Steven J. Spear. Essentially about 3 simple ideas: making problems easier to see; making problems easier to solve; making problem-solving easier.
I’ve been trying to help with incident management and reliability, so I read a bunch of books on Site Reliability Engineering. Similar to Software Engineering at Google, these are collections of essays from Googlers:
- Site Reliability Engineering. Edited by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Richard Murphy. (Also free online)
- The Site Reliability Workbook. Edited by Betsy Beyer, Niall Richard Murphy, David K. Rensin, Kent Kawahara, and Stephen Thorne (Also free online)
- Building Secure and Reliable Systems. Edited by Heather Adkins, Betsy Beyer, Paul Bankinship, Piotr Lewandowski, Ana Oprea, and Adam Stubblefield. (Also free online)
A couple of Gregor Hohpe’s books:
- The Software Architect Elevator. Collection of essays about what it means to be an effective software architect.
- Platform Strategy. Not as structured as the Platform Engineering book but I prefer it.
Foundations of Scalable Systems by Ian Gorton. This is a survey of the principles, patterns, practices, and technologies associated with scalable systems. Reminded me of Designing Data-Intensive Applications.
Outcomes over Outputs by Josh Seiden. This is where I first learned about the Resources → Activities → Outputs → Outcomes → Impact model.