Books on jeffcarp

Favorite Technical Books

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s a quick list of my favorite software engineering books I’ve read over the years. I plan to keep this list updated as I discover (or am recommended, hint hint) more.

Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government—Saving Privacy in the Digital Age, Levy
Cryptography Engineering: Design Principles and Practical Applications, Ferguson, Schneier, Kohno
Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Kleppmann
Designing Machine Learning Systems, Huyen
Reinforcement Learning, Winder
Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow, Geron
Site Reliability Engineering, Beyer, Jones, Petoff, Murphy
Linux Kernel Development, Love

Engineering Management for the Rest of Us reading notes

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I really enjoyed this book. Here are some of the biggest takeaways for me.

As a manager, your work is meetings. That means not protecting your calendar as much. People come before focus blocks. Corollary: making sure you can perform at a high level in meetings; meaning exercising in the morning or doing what it takes to make you the happiest and best person in meetings.

The importance of keeping a gratitude journal. Seeing the good in things makes you see the good in more things.

Favorite Books of 2021

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Happy new year! Here are my 5 favorite books of 2021.

Empire of Pain

A sprawling, enthralling story of the opiate epidemic told through the lens of multiple generations of the family that ushered it in. This book reminded me of Bad Blood, but with far larger scope.

In his book Opium: A History, Martin Booth observes that when it comes to products derived from the opium poppy, “history repeats itself.” During the American Civil War, morphine was widely embraced as a salve for terrible battlefield injuries, but it produced a generation of veterans who came home after the war addicted to the drug.

The Best Books I Read in 2019

Sat, 28 Dec 2019 11:11:11 +0800

Here are my 4 favorite books from 2019.

A British couple buys a farmhouse in the South of France and spends the next 12 months exploring the countryside, meeting the locals, renovating the house, and of course, eating and drinking well in [A Year In Provence](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/ 40189.A_Year_in_Provence) by Peter Mayle. For a premise that could come off as a little posh, the detail in this story is so rich and the storytelling so genial I couldn’t put it down. I recommend having Google translate closeby.

Inspired

Sat, 19 Jan 2019 17:07:11 -0800

Inspired is a great introduction on how to be a Product Manager by Marty Cagan, a former engineer turned product expert. Here’s one of my favorite themes of the book:

Product: build the right product
Engineering: build the product right

Here are the most poignant things I learned from this book organized by category.

Product team structure

It’s important to have somebody between product marketing and engineering (i.e. the product manager). Otherwise UX gets skipped and the TL has to figure out what to build, which is a bad recipe for product-market fit.
Also a bad idea is to let sales direct engineering, if you do that you get features, not products.
Most product orgs are basically feature factories… don’t be like that.

Engineering management

Run product management and design in parallel with engineering - the PM and designers should always be 1-2 sprints ahead of eng.
To combat tech debt, give the engineering team “headroom,” i.e. 20% of resources to do with it what they want.

The importance of prototypes

It’s really important to take an engineer or two and create usable prototypes during the discovery phase. Otherwise most startups use their entire eng process and release cycle to ship experiments in order for product to iterate. This is why it takes 1.5-2 years for most companies to find traction, and why many startups fail
Cagan argues that making a full mock with all intended functionality not only is preferrable, but will actually let you ship faster by reducing risk later in engineering.

General product management

Software projects have two stages: Discovery (build the right product) and Execution (build the product right). After the discovery phase ends, the product spec needs to be locked down otherwise changes create “churn.”
Don’t rely on your manager as a mentor, it’s not their job.
To prevent surprises and make sure meetings with lots of high level stakeholders run smoothly, reach out to them beforehand to get them on board.

I thought this book had some fresh things to say about confidence. Frequently confidence is looked upon negatively in tech—something that MBAs who don’t know what they’re talking about have. But I really liked Cagan’s take on it:

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Mon, 10 Dec 2018 15:38:56 -0800

This book is about two ways of thinking: the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. In the fixed mindset you’re a finished product. Expending any extra effort is unthinkable because supposedly you’re already perfect. Then there’s the growth mindset, which tells us the only way you learn is from mistakes, talent doesn’t get you very far, and the people who succeed are the ones who work the hardest.

The Manager's Path

Wed, 14 Nov 2018 15:32:22 -0800

I can’t recommend The Manager’s Path by Camille Fournier highly enough for Software Engineers. I found this book super useful for understanding the structure of technical organizations. It contains tons of gems that I want to write on sticky notes and post above my desk at work, like:

Especially as you become more senior, remember that your manager expects you to bring solutions, not problems.

Weird and Cool things from Linux Kernel Development

Fri, 12 Sep 2014 00:06:15 -0700

Recently I picked up Linux Kernel Development by Robert Love since I like his posts on Quora. Here are the things that I thought were cool or just surprised me.

Threaded Trees

Are cool. They act both like trees and linked lists.

Child processes vs Threads

The only difference between a child process and a thread in Linux is whether the CLONE_VM flag was passed to clone(), which copies the parent’s address space which allows the child to access the parent’s memory.