audiobook

At over 23 hours, this was a massive audiobook, but I think it’s one of the better books of software engineering advice I’ve read. The core framing is that programming is just the immediate act of producing code, while software engineering is what you have to do to keep that code sustainable over time and across a team, or as they put it, it’s programming if clever is a compliment and software engineering if clever is an accusation. Hyrum Wright is one of the co-authors, and you can tell he’s proud of Hyrum’s Law since it gets cited at least three times. It’s a solid observation though: with enough users, every observable quirk of your system becomes a contract someone depends on, and while Google obviously sees that at an extreme scale, I’ve seen it crop up even in my own smaller applications. ...

The Storm Before the Storm should have just been called Sulla: A History. Mike Duncan covers the decades from 146 BC to Sulla’s death in 78 BC, the stretch where the Roman Republic’s norms started breaking long before Caesar arrived, and while it spends a little time on the Gracchi and enough on Marius to set the stage, at least half the book belongs to Sulla. That isn’t really a complaint, though. Once Sulla shows up he dominates the period, and I learned a lot about a man I barely knew going in. ...

The first thing that struck me about The Foundations of Western Civilization was how abnormally fast it moved before it got to Greek history. The biggest Bronze Age civilizations got a lecture, and in five lectures or so we were in Greece and things slowed down. For Egypt in particular, it felt like they summed up the entirety of Egyptian history with a sentence or two each about the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, and New Kingdom, then talked a little about Egyptian life and were done. ...

The best part of the book was section 2, where it described different architecture styles and gave each one star ratings across a variety of characteristics, which I’m sure come from the authors’ experience with each style. I also liked how it framed microservices as part of a trend pendulum, reacting against the reuse pain that SOA left behind, since I like noticing when a new trend is really just correcting for the last one’s mistakes. I’m not an architect currently, so I have no need for architecture decision records (ADRs), except maybe for technical decisions made on personal projects so I can go back and remember the thought that went into them. I may start using adr-tools on my own for that. Since I mostly listened to this on runs, my notes don’t really do it justice. I want to go back sometime when I’m not out of breath and write proper summaries of the ratings for each architecture style. ...

I first read The Pragmatic Programmer years ago, and the 20th anniversary edition holds up really well. It isn’t just a nostalgia lap, since the updates feel necessary, folding in ideas like ETC (“Easier to Change”), functional-style data pipelines, and more modern concurrency patterns without losing the voice that made the original a classic. It reads less like a list of rules and more like advice from people who have actually shipped things and learned from what went wrong. ...

I didn’t find a lot of the advice in this book terribly useful. It mostly seemed like common sense backed by a bit of research. The onboarding advice was probably the most useful part, if only because I’m senior enough now that it might come in handy with junior colleagues. The idea is basically to focus on single activities at first, starting with concrete code instead of diagrams, and remembering that everything is new to them. It is easy to forget once you’ve been steeped in a codebase for years. ...

I listened to two Great Courses lecture series on existentialism, No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of Life by Robert C. Solomon and Existentialism and the Authentic Life by Skye C. Cleary. No Excuses had a lot of lectures devoted to fictional works, more than I expected from a philosophy course. The title comes from Sartre’s idea of Absolute Freedom, that even chained in a dungeon you’re still free to choose your own interpretation of the facts and how you react to them. The Bad Faith concept stuck with me too, the idea that you’re acting in bad faith any time your aspirations ignore the actual facts of your situation. I could aspire to be a champion basketball player, but the facts say I’m 5'11" and almost 50, so aspiring to that would be bad faith. ...

1177 BC is far less a final verdict than I would’ve preferred. Apparently, historians have discussed the Bronze Age collapse for at least 100 years, but this book mostly calls into question the traditional simple ideas and makes a case for a combination of earthquakes, revolts, and, to a much lesser extent than originally thought, the sea people invading, plus maybe some type of disruption of the trade networks, which again could be caused by the sea people or other unknown maritime raiders. ...