What I'm Currently Reading - Release It!

It's an oldie but a goodie. If you look on any top 10 list of software engineering Release It! will be somewhere near the top. Release It! focuses on designing robust software applications and some of the pitfalls that come with distributed complex systems.

I like this book because it takes a deep dive on those nasty, crippling production bugs that can bring down even the most well thought out system. I've seen my fair share of these types of bugs, where the actual problem is an innocuous line of code that was successfully code reviewed, unit-tested, and automated, yet it wasn't enough to prevent the debilitating application crash. This book gives good advice on how to deal with this reality and design systems that can withstand the rigors of production.
Here are my main takeaways so far.

Be cynical!: After reading this book we are taught to be cynical, pessimistic, and distrustful of our code. Danger lurks at every integration point and we must write our code expecting it to fail. Think deeply about the consequences of our failing code and design your architecture with that in mind.

Be anti-fragile: Unit tests and automation are wonderful, but we need our software to be anti-fragile. Beat up your software with in testing. Stress your system with load tests and keep your application running in test for long periods of time to try and uncover those bugs usually only found in production.

Know your design requirements: Should the checkout process be frozen because we can't talk to a third party affiliate? Probably not. Know the requirements of your system and design your failure scenarios accordingly.

Deploy early and often: The deployment process is one of the first things you should iron out. Deployments should be simple and low risk, if it is too hard then you need to rethink your design. Having an easy deployment process will make the team more likely to refactor code and make changes, which is a good thing. I have seen codebases where the team is afraid to make changes because of the difficulty and risk of deploying. This is demoralizing and a lesson that pushing our code needs to be easy.

I would recommend this book to a software engineer with any level of experience. It is a good lesson for all.