Here is a collection of books I’ve picked up over the years.
The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses (2011)
A must read for creating products in unstable, uncertain, or fast moving markets.
Focusing on validating ideas first and fast has been successful for me. Leaning orientated progression has been key for me when coming to terms with failures.
You need to have the conversation that there will be failures, but if you can learn from the failure and pivot, they will be worth it.
The Phoenix Project (2013)
A novel in the IT Operations world of Parts Unlimited, a large company in the middle of multiple disasters, and a new manager dropped in the middle of it.
One of my favourites that taught me a lot about dependencies, bottlenecks, and the mapping and allocation of work.
The Unicorn Project is a follow-up which has the same characters from a different perspective, which I’m finding fun.
Clean Code (2008)
Every good dev office has this and uses it as a reference for all PR’s, or has evolved beyond it. It’s a good basis to create policies on code architecture and etiquette in a collaborate environment. It can also settle disagreements.
Robert, affectionately Uncle Bob, is known as one of the inventors of the Agile Manifesto, SOLID Principles, and Test Driven Development. He’s prolific at Development conferences and often talks about how the industry started as academics work on years long projects to what we have today.
Continuous Delivery (2010)
This is the first book I read in the software development world.
My company at the time was deploying manually from a USB stick and a laptop in the middle of the office connected to Production.
Luckily the company had started a major transformation to cloud, which gave us scope to build git repos, CI/CD, configuration management, and automated testing. I was able to implement what I read. Couldn’t have been better timing.
If It Hurts, Do It More Frequently, and Bring The Pain Forward
More books I haven’t added here yet
- The Mythical Man Month (1975)
- Implementing Lean Software Development (2006)
- Agile Retrospectives (2006)
- Refactoring (1999)
- Domain-Driven Design (2003)
- Head First Design Patterns (2004)
- Working Effectively with Legacy Code (2004)
- The Art of Unit Testing (2013)