
Books… What’s on the Reading List?
- Alex Morgan
- Books , Learning , Education
- November 1, 2024
Dropping some books I’m reading or maybe it’d be more accurate to say some books I’m finally reading. Most have been my shelf a while. I’ve been jumping in and out of each of these, sometimes picking up the actual book and sometimes a listen to the audiobook version but I’m enjoying each.
The Current Reading List
Building Secure and Reliable Systems
2019
- Heather Adkin’s, Betsy Breyer, Paul Blankinship, Piotr Lewandowski, Ana Opera & Adam Stubblefield
Link
https://sre.google/books/
I’ve had this sat on my shelf for longer than I’d like to admit. This has been a really interesting read so far, as are most things coming out of the Google SRE team. Looking forward to jumping further into it and enjoying the call outs around how difficult and painful it can be to bolt on reliability and security after-the-fact.
The story at the start is great, talking about a failing internal password manager, a hardware security module (HSM) smart card system locked in the safe and how the code for the safe was stored in the now offline password manager, brilliant!
My favourite quote so far:
Over time, the horses are found; only the zebras are left.
The Agony of Decision: Mental Readiness and Leadership in a Crisis
2017
- Helio Fred Garcia
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35879129-the-agony-of-decision
Picked this up as a recommendation from Melanie Ensign and have been enjoying it. With a focus on clear thinking as the key to getting through a crisis well and how reputation in a crisis is completely in a leaders control, how there is the opportunity to inspire trust and confidence.
My favourite quote so far:
The English word crisis derives from the ancient greek word krisis, which means decision, or choice, especially at a turning point where one’s destiny is determined one way or another.
Accelerate - Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations
2018
- Gene Kim, Jez Humble, and Nicole Forsgren
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35747076-accelerate
This is an interesting book that I was mostly listening to as an audiobook, though I bought the actual book too. This was a suggestion a long while back from some folks in the Duo security team. Enjoying the layout of the methods and how they approached the research. A solid focus on culture and how impactful this is, with a nice callout that “Leaders must commit - action, not just words”.
My favourite quotes so far:
Our measure should focus on outcomes not output
Our analysis is clear: in today’s fast-moving and competitive world, the best thing you can do for your products, your company, and your people is institute a culture of experimentation and learning, and invest in the technical and management capabilities that enable it.
The Staff Engineers Path
2022
- Tanya Reily
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-staff-engineers/9781098118723/
I was checking out Kane Narraway’s blog post Crossing The Chasm: Getting to Senior/Staff Engineer it got me thinking more about the Staff engineer path. I’ve been a people leader in the past and enjoyed it, and as part of that role I got to manage some amazing technical leaders on this path outside of people management. I felt this would be a good opportunity to learn more about the staff engineer path and role overall, as I look at my own career but also to be able to help those in that role or approaching it.
My favourite quotes so far:
What will Future You wish that Present You had done.
As you grow in influence, you’ll find that more and more people want you to care about things. Someone’s putting together a best practices document for how your organization does code review, and they want your opinion. Your group is doing a hiring push and needs help deciding what to interview for. There’s a deprecation that would be making more progress if it had a staff engineer drumming up senior sponsorship. And that’s just Monday morning. What do you do?
Kubernetes Up & Running, 3rd Edition
2022
- Brendan Burns, Joe Beda, Kelsey Hightower, Lachlan Evenson
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/kubernetes-up-and/9781098110192/
As mentioned in [[My Kubernetes Learning Track]] I’ve been digging back into Kubernetes and picked this up, this has been great along with some of the hands-on bits and pieces. I read a great review that made me pick this up: “You cannot make a book about ‘death by yaml’ any more interesting.”
My favourite quote so far:
kubectl delete