2017 Summer Reading List

Honest confession - I miss those high school summer reading assignments. In the spirit of those summer reading lists, I chose a list of books I’ll aim to finish throughout this summer.

  • Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
    • For twenty-five years Dan Lyons was a magazine writer at the top of his profession–until one Friday morning when he received a phone call: Poof. His job no longer existed. “I think they just want to hire younger people,” his boss at Newsweek told him. Fifty years old and with a wife and two young kids, Dan was, in a word, screwed. Then an idea hit. Dan had long reported on Silicon Valley and the tech explosion. Why not join it? HubSpot, a Boston start-up, was flush with $100 million in venture capital. They offered Dan a pile of stock options for the vague role of “marketing fellow.” What could go wrong?
  • Why Coolidge Matters: Leadership Lessons from America’s Most Underrated President
    • Why Coolidge Matters revisits the record of our most underrated president, examining Coolidge’s views on governance, public sector unions, education, race, immigration, and foreign policy. Most importantly, Why Coolidge Matters explains what lessons Coolidge—the last president to pay down the national debt—can offer the limited government movement in the post-industrial age.
  • Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation
    • Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This groundbreaking new book sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers, and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours— sometimes even minutes–no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base.
  • Domain-Driven Design Distilled
    • Domain-Driven Design (DDD) software modeling delivers powerful results in practice, not just in theory, which is why developers worldwide are rapidly moving to adopt it. Now, for the first time, there’s an accessible guide to the basics of DDD: What it is, what problems it solves, how it works, and how to quickly gain value from it.
  • Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager
    • This book is full of stories based on companies in the Silicon Valley where people have been known to yell at each other and occasionally throw chairs. It is a place full of dysfunctional bright people who are in an incredible hurry to find the next big thing so they can strike it rich and then do it all over again. Among these people are managers, a strange breed of people who, through a mystical organizational ritual, have been given power over the future and bank accounts of many others. Whether you’re an aspiring manager, a current manager, or just wondering what the heck a manager does all day, there is a story in this book that will speak to you—and help you survive and prosper amongst the general craziness.

Thanks to all of those that recommended books - if you have a recommendation, please tweet me! @krodmannix