We have picked out our top books that have influenced us and our 'The Flywheel Effect' book.
1. 'Continuous Delivery' came out in 2011. And it has been massively influential in how high performing teams deliver their software today. It is still as fresh as it was when it was written.
2. 'Domain Driven Design' describes good domain models and the importance of collaboration, communication and shared understanding, You can be in different types of stacks or scenarios, but the knowledge is abstract so it's applicable.
3. The Simon Wardley Book I find myself always going back to it. It's chunky and quite academic. But it's as deep as well. I don't take every word of it literally. But it's definitely a good read and will challenge your thinking still to this day.
4. 'Accelerate' This is a game changer. It distills down and captures (with scientific backing) all of the things that we were trying to articulate or were trying to push or evolve in our ecosystem.The capabilities to drive improvement, the scientific backing and little snippets of good advice and guidance.
5. 'Extreme Ownership' There's some cracking guidance on how to own something and lead. One that sticks out is centralised command and leading up and down the line. It's a well thought out and structured book on how to think, modern leadership and how to motivate people to be successful. I enjoy reading about how to think through systems, particularly in a leadership position.
6. 'Team Topologies' It's such a powerful question to ask 'what type of team are you?' The answer is that you're a platform team, an enablement team, a value stream team or you're not anything. And all the techniques are in it with different tools and team API's etc. You can pick it up and implement tomorrow.
7. 'Reaching Cloud Velocity' It covers how to succeed in the cloud. In other words what are the principles and tenets that you should apply. What are the cultural, organisational and architectural approaches you should adopt.
8. 'Designing Data Intensive Applications' is almost a bible for anything data related such as streaming, different types of databases and why you make decisions on certain types of databases. You get into the design and the nuance of it. And understanding the landscape.
9. 'Creativity Inc' The book is about Pixar, who went up against Disney by direct selling films. The full title of the book is 'Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration' . They talk about the inspiration of creating and then actually making it. And how they structured the company and all the challenges they had.
10. 'Working Backwards' We see Amazon from the outside eg. amazon.com, Amazon Prime, deliveries and Alexa. But how do they actually do it? How can they be so successful and set themselves up for success? What way are their leadership structured?
11. 'Ask Your Developer' looks at the developer centric approach at Twilio. There's a lot of good content on how to inspire great individuals and teams to be creative and on developer experience, their golden path and off roading.
12. 'The Software Architect Elevator' I love his concept of an architect riding the elevator to talk to the executive in the penthouse, going down to the basement to write code and then all the floors in between. He talks about the how an architect can b
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Serverless Craic Ep21 Become an awesome software architect with these 12 books