The Beginning Software Engineer's Playbook


Book Description

The Beginning Software Engineer's Playbook is a non-fictional guide/handbook for beginner and mid-level software engineers to navigate some of the often-overlooked parts of their career. This book contains habits, techniques, and mental frameworks to adopt and use in order to sustainably grow in their careers. It allows the reader to pull from my experiences, as I've faced many challenges dealing with giant code bases, navigating burnout and impostor syndrome, networking inside and outside of work for more opportunities, prioritizing physical and mental health during stressful sprints, and much, much more. What's really important to me is that this book empowers those who would like to enter the world of software engineering, are just now entering it, or are in the middle of their careers to benefit from my battle tested advice and mental frameworks. This is a practical playbook that you'll be able to revisit time and time again throughout your career in order to strategize on how to best tackle an issue or overcome an obstacle.




An Elegant Puzzle


Book Description

A human-centric guide to solving complex problems in engineering management, from sizing teams to handling technical debt. There’s a saying that people don’t leave companies, they leave managers. Management is a key part of any organization, yet the discipline is often self-taught and unstructured. Getting to the good solutions for complex management challenges can make the difference between fulfillment and frustration for teams—and, ultimately, between the success and failure of companies. Will Larson’s An Elegant Puzzle focuses on the particular challenges of engineering management—from sizing teams to handling technical debt to performing succession planning—and provides a path to the good solutions. Drawing from his experience at Digg, Uber, and Stripe, Larson has developed a thoughtful approach to engineering management for leaders of all levels at companies of all sizes. An Elegant Puzzle balances structured principles and human-centric thinking to help any leader create more effective and rewarding organizations for engineers to thrive in.




Software Engineering at Google


Book Description

Today, software engineers need to know not only how to program effectively but also how to develop proper engineering practices to make their codebase sustainable and healthy. This book emphasizes this difference between programming and software engineering. How can software engineers manage a living codebase that evolves and responds to changing requirements and demands over the length of its life? Based on their experience at Google, software engineers Titus Winters and Hyrum Wright, along with technical writer Tom Manshreck, present a candid and insightful look at how some of the world’s leading practitioners construct and maintain software. This book covers Google’s unique engineering culture, processes, and tools and how these aspects contribute to the effectiveness of an engineering organization. You’ll explore three fundamental principles that software organizations should keep in mind when designing, architecting, writing, and maintaining code: How time affects the sustainability of software and how to make your code resilient over time How scale affects the viability of software practices within an engineering organization What trade-offs a typical engineer needs to make when evaluating design and development decisions




Site Reliability Engineering


Book Description

The overwhelming majority of a software system’s lifespan is spent in use, not in design or implementation. So, why does conventional wisdom insist that software engineers focus primarily on the design and development of large-scale computing systems? In this collection of essays and articles, key members of Google’s Site Reliability Team explain how and why their commitment to the entire lifecycle has enabled the company to successfully build, deploy, monitor, and maintain some of the largest software systems in the world. You’ll learn the principles and practices that enable Google engineers to make systems more scalable, reliable, and efficient—lessons directly applicable to your organization. This book is divided into four sections: Introduction—Learn what site reliability engineering is and why it differs from conventional IT industry practices Principles—Examine the patterns, behaviors, and areas of concern that influence the work of a site reliability engineer (SRE) Practices—Understand the theory and practice of an SRE’s day-to-day work: building and operating large distributed computing systems Management—Explore Google's best practices for training, communication, and meetings that your organization can use




Design for Software


Book Description

A unique resource to help software developers create a desirable user experience Today, top-flight software must feature a desirable user experience. This one-of-a-kind book creates a design process specifically for software, making it easy for developers who lack design background to create that compelling user experience. Appealing to both tech-savvy designers and creative-minded technologists, it establishes a hybrid discipline that will produce first-rate software. Illustrated in full color, it shows how to plan and visualize the design to create software that works on every level. Today's software demands attention to the quality of the user experience; this book guides you through a practical design process to achieve that goal Approaches the mechanics of design with a process inspired by art and science Avoids the abstract and moves step by step through techniques you can put to use immediately Covers planning your design, tested methods, how to visualize like a designer, psychology of design, and how to create software that developers will appreciate Explores such elements as choosing the right typeface and managing interactivity Design for Software: A Playbook for Developers brings the art of good design together with the science of software development to create programs with pizazz.




Making Software


Book Description

Many claims are made about how certain tools, technologies, and practices improve software development. But which claims are verifiable, and which are merely wishful thinking? In this book, leading thinkers such as Steve McConnell, Barry Boehm, and Barbara Kitchenham offer essays that uncover the truth and unmask myths commonly held among the software development community. Their insights may surprise you. Are some programmers really ten times more productive than others? Does writing tests first help you develop better code faster? Can code metrics predict the number of bugs in a piece of software? Do design patterns actually make better software? What effect does personality have on pair programming? What matters more: how far apart people are geographically, or how far apart they are in the org chart? Contributors include: Jorge Aranda Tom Ball Victor R. Basili Andrew Begel Christian Bird Barry Boehm Marcelo Cataldo Steven Clarke Jason Cohen Robert DeLine Madeline Diep Hakan Erdogmus Michael Godfrey Mark Guzdial Jo E. Hannay Ahmed E. Hassan Israel Herraiz Kim Sebastian Herzig Cory Kapser Barbara Kitchenham Andrew Ko Lucas Layman Steve McConnell Tim Menzies Gail Murphy Nachi Nagappan Thomas J. Ostrand Dewayne Perry Marian Petre Lutz Prechelt Rahul Premraj Forrest Shull Beth Simon Diomidis Spinellis Neil Thomas Walter Tichy Burak Turhan Elaine J. Weyuker Michele A. Whitecraft Laurie Williams Wendy M. Williams Andreas Zeller Thomas Zimmermann




The Social Engineer's Playbook


Book Description

The Social Engineer's Playbook is a practical guide to pretexting and a collection of social engineering pretexts for Hackers, Social Engineers and Security Analysts. Build effective social engineering plans using the techniques, tools and expert guidance in this book. Learn valuable elicitation techniques, such as: Bracketing, Artificial Ignorance, Flattery, Sounding Board and others. This book covers an introduction to tools, such as: Maltego, Social Engineer Toolkit, Dradis, Metasploit and Kali Linux among others. Crucial to any social engineering test is the information used to build it. Discover the most valuable sources of intel and how to put them to use.




Web Scalability for Startup Engineers


Book Description

This invaluable roadmap for startup engineers reveals how to successfully handle web application scalability challenges to meet increasing product and traffic demands. Web Scalability for Startup Engineers shows engineers working at startups and small companies how to plan and implement a comprehensive scalability strategy. It presents broad and holistic view of infrastructure and architecture of a scalable web application. Successful startups often face the challenge of scalability, and the core concepts driving a scalable architecture are language and platform agnostic. The book covers scalability of HTTP-based systems (websites, REST APIs, SaaS, and mobile application backends), starting with a high-level perspective before taking a deep dive into common challenges and issues. This approach builds a holistic view of the problem, helping you see the big picture, and then introduces different technologies and best practices for solving the problem at hand. The book is enriched with the author's real-world experience and expert advice, saving you precious time and effort by learning from others' mistakes and successes. Language-agnostic approach addresses universally challenging concepts in Web development/scalability—does not require knowledge of a particular language Fills the gap for engineers in startups and smaller companies who have limited means for getting to the next level in terms of accomplishing scalability Strategies presented help to decrease time to market and increase the efficiency of web applications




The Tech Entrepreneur’s Financial Playbook


Book Description

When an entrepreneur starts a business, his or her focus is on developing a product or service to sell to customers, and then on landing the initial customers. Off the radar for most entrepreneurs are mundane tasks relating to accounting, finance, governance and human resources. These tasks are often ignored by small companies that don’t know what to do and are confused by complex requirements from various jurisdictions. Yet these roles are critical to every company large and small. Without back office tasks being performed regularly and accurately, a company will be swamped during due diligence from an investor or acquirer. Or a surprise state tax audit could turn ugly. Also, management won’t understand how the company is performing or how much capital is available to reinvest in growth. But these responsibilities can be addressed simply and at a low cost in any small technology business. Built on three decades of entrepreneurship and honed by experience working with dozens of entrepreneurs, this text guides entrepreneurs on best practices for the necessary back office functions of a technology business. This text includes steps to effectively implement simple procedures so that finance and administration doesn’t impede the company’s growth or valuation.




Software Designers in Action


Book Description

Software Designers in Action: A Human-Centric Look at Design Work examines how developers actually perform software design in their day-to-day work. The book offers a comprehensive look at early software design, exploring the work of professional designers from a range of different viewpoints. Divided into four sections, it discusses various theore