I’m out today, coaching in Salt Lake City. However, I’ve been thinking about a few books after discussions with various customers and attendees at a few events. I wanted to give you a few recommendations on books that I think are good reads for thinking about DevOps.
The Mythical Man Month
I can’t remember if I read The Mythical Man Month in college or early in my career, but it’s a seminal book in our industry. It talks about a lot of problems with building software in large projects.
I’ve re-read this a few times, most recently during the pandemic. However, it’s a good once-a-year book to remind yourself of why we try to become better engineers.
If you’ve never read it, you should pick up a copy and give it a go.
The Goal
I read this before The Phoenix Project, and had a sense of deja vu with the Phoenix Project as these are very similar stories. I think The Goal is the better book, and worth a read. I hadn’t read it in a few years, but I restarted it recently because it helped me re-think about how I might approach some of the challenges my customers face.
The book is set in an analog world, with manufacturing equipment in a factory, but if you think about the machines as your dev systems and the different operators as developers, you start to see how and why bottlenecks occur.
The Phoenix Project
A rewrite of The Goal in many ways, The Phoenix Project is the software dev side of the IT world, showcasing, or maybe exaggerating the issues we face. It’s short, easy to read, and funny in places.
Or maybe sad.
I found myself remembering similar situations as I read it. I think I’ve read this every year or two to remind myself of how silly we can be.
Worth picking up for you or your team, especially if you struggle with building software efficiently that meets your clients’ needs.
The DevOps Handbook
I’ve read a few books that were geared to the more technical side of DevOps or software. There are even more recent books, like Accelerate, tackling the topic, but I liked the DevOps Handbook one best. It breaks down the different stages we struggle with in software, and provides some sort of maturity model to help you think about how to better build software.
I really enjoyed this book, though it was long. It took my quite some time to get through, but it was worth the time as I had to stop and think about how I might tackle some of these situations.
There are more focused, and more modern articles/blogs/etc, on the various topics in here, but this is a great general overview of modern software development.