The Art of Immutable Architecture: Theory and Practice of Data Management in Distributed Systems by Michael L. Perry
To be honest I’m not sure what I though about this book. It contains material on distributed systems and the difficulty of achieving consensus, and also explains how immutability helps us work around some of the problems. In particular there is a good discussion of using CRDTs. The author then goes on to describe his technique of historical modelling which brings together immutability and eventual consistency to give us a way to architect distributed systems.
Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the Management Track by Will Larson
I really enjoyed the first half of this book which describes the Staff Engineer role, in an attempt to define what it is. There is lots of good advice in this section about how to do the role well – how to influence, how to present ideas and how to get the role in the first place.
The second half of the book is a series of interviews with Staff Engineers from a number of companies, where the various people are asked about what the role means in their company and how they got the role. It also asks them what an average day looks like. I must admit that I found this part of the book hard work and gave up reading the stories.
There’s also a large set of references to articles and blog posts which a Staff Engineer should read. I found this list really useful and have been working my way through the references.
Category Theory for Programmers by Bartosz Milewski
I worked my way through this book (yet again) and I absolutely love the book. The author explains the material really well, giving the motivations behind the various concepts and going into a good discussion of how they relate to programming. It won’t be long before I read it all again.
This book is put together from a series of blog posts, and the material is also available as an online set of lectures.
