williamhathaway.com » books

Thumbs up for “Release It!”

William Hathaway — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 03:53:28 +0000

I borrowed “Release It!” from Bill Kratzer a few weeks ago and have really enjoyed reading it. My favorite quote from the book is “Feature complete does not mean production ready”. I think this sums up a lot of large software projects, especially when there is a disconnect between the development team and the group responsible for deployment and operations.

The book covers 4 main topics:

Stability
Capacity
General Design Issues
Operations

In most of the sections the author breaks his advice down into an introduction (with a real example showing a problem), a set of anti-patterns that encourage the problem and a set of patterns to help software cope with the various stresses placed on it and make it manageable.

The book stays at a relatively high level of discussion and is easy to follow. If you are looking for lots of low-level coding examples you will be disappointed, but I think the book offers good advice that can be consumed by a wide range of people ranging from developers, to system administrators, and to project managers.

Last year I was involved in a project that struggled with a lot of the issues mentioned in this book and I think that hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless hours of stress and frustration could have been saved if this book had been required reading at the start of the project.

I recommend this book to anyone involved in developing or operating software services, or managing the people that do.

Reading Frenzy

William Hathaway — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 15:31:16 +0000

I’ve been taking advantage of my vacation time during the past week and a half by reading a motley collection of technology, science, career, and military history books. One of the books (“Ship It!”) I had to read on the computer via the Safari on-line book service since it isn’t available in paper form yet. It has been nice to spend a lot of time focused and really absorbing material versus the tons of short-form articles/blog entries that I tend to read while doing interrupt driven surfing on the computer. I know my reading pace will slow down substantially when works starts up again, but I want to keep tackling at least one new book a week.

searching for library books using WorldCat

William Hathaway — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 14:38:10 +0000

Over the holiday vacation my brother mentioned he was a big fan of a library search service called WorldCat. If you give WorldCat a book or media title/ISBN, it will search thousands of library catalogs and let you know if it finds any libraries nearby that have it. Not all libraries are indexed by WorldCat, so depending on where you live (and your library system) mileage may vary, but it is worth checking out.

What I’m reading

William Hathaway — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 04:34:50 +0000

I started reading an interesting book called Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine today. The first chapter gives some fascinating background on the history of the medical profession, such as:

How bloodletting was an extremely popular medical practice all the way from the ancient Greeks up until the last 150 years or so (and has some specific uses now). George Washington’s doctors drained about half of his blood in the two days before he died in a misguided attempt to help him.
The first documented precursor to the clinical trial was to test various cures for scurvy (and the results ended up giving a huge naval advantage to England). If you were a navy sailor in the 1700s you were much more likely to die from scurvy than fighting.
Florence Nightingale‘s desire to make hospitals more hygienic saved thousands of lives and her excellent statistical background helped her prove the value to a skeptical medical community.

Physics for Future Presidents – The book

William Hathaway — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 20:13:25 +0000

I had blogged awhile ago about a UC Berkley course informally titled “Physics for Future Presidents” that I had listened to on my iPod and found really enjoyable. The professor has just released a book version meant for the casual reader (you don’t need to be a physics egghead at all). I found my copy when I got home on Friday and am about 1/3 through it. If you have any interest in learning about things that a “future president” should know about terrorism, energy, nukes, space, and global warming etc… to help make policy decisions, this book is a fantastic read, I’d highly recommend it.

Amazon Link

If you are someone I see on a regular basis and want to borrow my copy, just let me know. I’ll be done with it by Tuesday at the latest.

Really good book on the psychology behind rationalization

William Hathaway — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 12:38:22 +0000

I just finished reading Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Travis and Elliot Aronson. There are already a ton of reviews on Amazon that discuss the book in detail, so I’ll just give the 2 cent summary: It covers how once people make a decision, they will generally change their perception of the facts and alter their behavior in order to reduce cognitive dissonance that it might not have been the best choice. There are a lot of case studies used in the book that explain many interesting scenarios. The book also talks about how to avoid falling into the trap of self-justification so that one can admit and learn from their mistakes.

I really liked the book, it gave me some insight into decisions and the resulting actions I’ve made in the past that I’m not particularly proud of. After reading the book I feel better equipped to analyze my own behavior and hopefully it will help reduce some of the self-justification I’ll do in the future. I’m going to bring it into the office, so if anyone that works with me wants to borrow it just let me know.