Holiday Reading Review 2019/2020

Sun Jan 05 2020

I didn't expect to do much reading this Christmas holiday, but after a few days of winding down my head felt clear and longing to learn and read.

I downloaded a wide selection of books before leaving home (and a good internet connection), but I didn't have an agenda of which of those I wanted to read.

The Phoenix Project

I started with The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford. I bought it on Amazon for Kindle only because it was $0 that the day and I had heard that it had something to do with DevOps. The fact that it was a novel convinced me that it was appropriate enough for a family Christmas holiday.

The Phoenix Project ended up being the least relaxing to read of the books I ended up reading because I could empathise with the stress that the narrator endured. However, it did end up being very enlightening to me.

Before I read the book I was aware of, but didn't fully know a world before DevOps. My first job in the industry was at a company with a fully developed DevOps culture and very competent DevOps team. It was only at my second job where the head developer had to ssh into the production server to manually deploy our applications where I realised that DevOps wasn't ubiquitous yet.

The Phoenix project gave me a better idea of what companies, developers and operations had to deal with before DevOps came along and what issues DevOps serves to address.

DevOps in Python

The second book that I read was DevOps in Python by Moshe Zadka. I expected this book to be more about DevOps than Python, but it was more of a tour through some Python modules and packages that you might want to have as part of your DevOps toolkit. Still, I enjoyed it, particularly the cryptography and the Paramiko chapters as I had never heard of packages such as Fernet, PyNaCl, Passlib and Paramiko before.

Two Scoops of Django

Next, I started with Two Scoops of Django by Daniel Roy Greenfield and Audrey Roy Greenfield and boy, was that a good choice! I'm only about halfway through it by now, but for someone who works only occasionally with Django it is really useful.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how different frameworks like Django, Ruby on Rails and Laravel relate to each other and how one might more quickly learn one after knowing the other. This book really marks the spot in getting you up to scratch on the best practices and common patterns you should follow when developing Django applications. While reading it is easy to make the connections between the frameworks you already know well and Django.

Designing Data-intensive Applications

Lastly, I started reading a random chapter of Designing Data-intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann one night when I couldn't fall asleep. I had started to read it on a previous occasion, but with the intention of studying it closely. This time I decided to read it leisurely.

Reading it without putting pressure on myself to memorise and understand every single detail, and the fact that I didn't have internet access that I could use to click on every second reference, helped me make better progress and enjoy it more this time.

Martin Kleppmann did an exceptional job at making this book accessible and understandable for even beginner programmers, as well as interesting and educational to more experienced people. The book provides a whirlwind tour through the different types of data systems available and how they work.

I certainly can't recall all of the details in the book, but I will be able to make a more informed decision on what databases to use in the future, as well as recognise some of the terms used to describe and categorise data systems.

At the end of my holiday felt quite amazed with how much I managed read and learn and how effortless it felt. I'm formulating how I could continue to read more of these types of books throughout the year because it felt so satisfying. It reminded me that tutorials and articles can't always provide the same depth and coverage that books are able to.