Matt O’ Rama

Book Review: Release It!

Get Release It! on Amazon

A few weeks ago I heard an interview on Software Engineering Radio with Michael Nygard, author of a book I hadn’t heard of called Release It! My wife had been reading Ship It! and I had heard good things about Manage It! so I was happy to hear about this new book. Over the course of the hour or so interview, Mr. Nygard made one heck of a case both for the book and for his way of thinking about writing software.

Mr. Nygard is a operations guy. That is to say his job is to help big companies maintain the software they use. The focus of the book is pointing out ways developers can engineer their software to work better with operations and be more maintainable. It’s an unfortunately seldom seen topic in programming but at least now we have a fairly thorough book to reference on the topic.

The book starts out with a pretty scary tale of a post-mortem the author did on a huge outage at a major airline. It’s a very interesting look at a huge failure that ended up being caused by a pretty small programming error that any of us could make. He also talks here about getting a thread dump of a Java process to find out where it’s having trouble which I had occasion to use in real life right after I finished the book.

The structure of the book is to introduce a topic, then do a section on Patterns and Anti-Patterns around that topic. The first section is Stability. He talks about different types of failure, and defines stability in the first place which ends up being harder than you’d anticipate. Having spent most of my professional career so far writing internal corporate applications, this was the first place where the book veered off from being specifically applicable to my life. Not to say we corporate developers don’t have to worry about customers or uptime but it’s a different set of concerns. Nobody is going to switch to another billing system because the one we work on is down. But still, it’s useful stuff.

The 2nd section of the book is Capacity. Admittedly, I skimmed this section since I’m not working on anything right now that requires accounting for massive amounts of users or fine-tuning my Ajax requests. I will revisit this section for sure when I get onto something more relevant.

The 3rd section is General Design Issues; split into sections on Network, basic Security, Availability, and Administration. Section 4 is Operations. Both of these are very valuable. Just about everything is illustrated with real examples and specific recommendations, which I like to see.

I like reading about Anti-Patterns because I’m always on the lookout for not only ways to do things but ways not to do things. The Patterns are, of course, good things to keep in mind whether you’re developing a website or a corporate integration program. In fact the Patterns in this book are probably the highlight. Things like using Timeouts, Circuit Breakers, and Connection Pooling are timeless and useful all over, hallmarks of really being Patterns and not just quick fixes and bandaids.

Overall if you’re developing any kind of serious software that’s going to have to serve users and be maintained over time, this book should really be on your bookshelf. It’s the rare book that works first as a read-through and then as a reference to be returned to later. Especially if you’re not the one who has to maintain your code, the focus on Operations is a very valuable way of thinking. If you’ve read the book I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts in the comments.

Get Release It! on Amazon

Just Enough MBA to Be a Programmer

I’ve always been curious about what MBAs really do. In my weaker moments, I’ve even thought that the only reason people got an MBA was to demand a higher salary or to “move up the corporate ladder” into some management job. What did these MBA ninjas actually learn in school? Would having an MBA help me better understand how I affected my company’s bottom line? Although I had the curiosity, I never acted on it. This changed when another programmer recommended that I read The Ten-Day MBA by Steven Silbiger.

via Moserware: Just Enough MBA to Be a Programmer.

This book looks like something both my wife and I would both like. I’m like Jeff Moser here, I’m curious about what people actually learn doing this stuff but not enough to read a bunch of boring books full of business-speak. $12 for an overview sounds good to me. It never hurts to be more well-rounded as a team member in any case. Even if I just get an overview of the financial pieces and the jargon people use, it’ll be worth it.

My wife is also in the process of setting up a business with a couple of partners to market some software she wrote. Even though she’s the programmer and her partners are the sales/business end of things, it’s never good to cede control over something that important to somebody else with no understanding of what they’ll be doing.

Jeff does a great job of going over the various sections of the book and what you’ll learn in each and I applaud him for the effort. If you’re cheap, you can probably get by with just Jeff’s post, to be honest. But an overview of an overview is one level of remove too much for me. I read fast anyway so it’ll be time well spent I think. Plus, when somebody asks me something about business I can say I read a book about MBAs, not that I read a blog post about a book about MBAs. :)

Rands in Repose tshirts to support First Book

Rands in Repose bamboo tshirt – Supporting First Book!
One of my favorite bloggers, Rands, is giving 100% of the proceeds from his new tshirt to First Book, which helps give books to kids from low-income families. Like Rands, books are one of the most important things in my life and I’m more than happy to help give kids books. Please consider donating to First Book even if you don’t want one of the rad tshirts.

Say yes.

No is for wimps. No is for pussies. No is to live small and embittered, cherishing the opportunities you missed because they might have sent the wrong message.

Awesome old Dave Eggers interview. It’s worth reading the whole thing. One of my favorites ever.

Kurt Vonnegut is Dead

Kurt Vonnegut, Counterculture’s Novelist, Dies NY Times

Dammit. I’m as sad about this as I guess I can be about somebody who I never met. Like a lot of his fans, Vonnegut’s work meant a lot to me. More than most writers, even ones whose work I also love. I did feel like I knew him at least a little bit, based on how much of him was in his work. I started reading his work because I’d heard he was a science fiction writer, during the period when I was young (probably no older than 12) when I read only science fiction. Of course his work ended up being much, much more than just sf, without the nose-in-the-air refutation of the genre you get from people like Margaret Atwood. He always said he was glad when his work was finally removed from the science fiction drawer since people tend to mistake that one for a toilet. Slaughterhouse 5 was his best book, but I always loved Breakfast of Champions. BoC was a fun book, as dark as it is in some parts. The part near the end when Vonnegut, in the book as a character, remembers that the other character is supposed to be a speed reader and quickly makes him have taken a speed reading course so he can speed read the book he’s holding just blew my writer’s mind when I was younger. The sheer audacity of that impressed the hell out of me.

One of the things that makes me even more sad about his death is that he had to die during the Bush administration. Those people made him so angry and just confirmed his worst feelings about the darkness of humanity that I’m sad he never got to see their consignment to the scrapheap of history. I hope he did see things turning around though, as I think they are.

Luckily for us, we still have his heart, spread around through the characters and books he created. Even still, I’ll miss having him around.

So it goes.

EDIT: Jessica at Indexed (one of my favorite new sites) has such a great memorial to Kurt Vonnegut I have to share it. She nailed him completely.

On Africa and Africans

How to write about Africa In Granta by Binyavanga Wainaina

I finished reading The Wizard Of The Crow a few weeks ago and can only now really appreciate this essay I think. Everything we in American seem to hear about Africa and Africans comes directly from what he says here. I was really blown away by the portrayal of everyday Africans in that book since I never see that. If you have any interest in Africa, I encourage you to read books by native African authors, you get a completely different sense of the place, as a setting instead of as a character itself like most non-natives seem to want to write.

A Reader’s Dilemma

I just finished the very good and interesting, but also very long, book The Wizard of the Crow (750+ pages) and of course now I’m looking for the next book to read. I got my copy of Sacred Games and of course I want to read that next but it’s 900 pages. I’ve always been in the habit of sort-of cleansing my palate in between big or tough books with a short paperback, usually some science fiction that won’t tax my mind. It’s a weird practice, but I went through a phase where I read the last page of everything I read first so I’m used to my eccentricities. The rub comes with my 2007 goal of doing an autodidact literature “class” for myself by using my website Unreads.com to deeply read and really study a bunch of classics. I listened to a couple of audio courses from The Learning Company (everything they have by Arnold Weinstein, my new personal learning guru, and Books That Have Made History) and bought a bunch of the books. Those courses were an incredibly enlightening experience I’ll post on more later, they’re very much recommended. So I’ve painted myself into a corner by wanting to cleanse my palate but also not wanting to waste any reading time with fluff. My compromise is that I brought my collection of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays to get in some of my “studying” without having to commit to a whole book while Sacred Games is beckoning to me. Being a reader is fraught with problems, I tell you. :)

Compact nonsense

Great Books In Half The Time

Weidenfeld and Nicolson have come up with ‘Compact Editions’. Tag line: Great Books in Half the Time.

in the first series of Compact Editions Anna Karenina, Moby-Dick along with David Copperfield, The Mill on the Floss, Vanity Fair and Wives and Daughters will be ’sympathetically edited’ down to fewer than 400 pages. But don’t fret – so sympathetic are these editors that they will keep the central plot, characters and historical background.

There’s not really much else I could say to add to what Jenny Diski says about this abominable practice. It’s one thing for someone to read the Cliff Notes of a book instead of the book but when publishers start “compacting” great books into less than half of what they once were, it’s unconscionable. Diski is completely right about this, a cut-down Moby Dick is not Moby Dick, it’s some other book written by someone who I assure you is nowhere near as talented as Melville. Why not just read the read the Wikipedia page and pretend you read the book? It’s the same practice. You haven’t read Moby Dick in either case so what do you care? It’s only giving people a safe way to lie about having read the book since in theory the words were all written down by the original author, just not in the same order, placement, or with the same impact. Yes, Moby Dick is a long book and it contains probably too much detail about whaling and whales but THAT’S PART OF THE BOOK! You can’t take that stuff out and pretend you read Moby Dick, you just can’t. You can’t drive halfway to your destination and then tell everybody you went there and it was great and wasn’t it awesome that you got to do it in half the time by avoiding the boring stuff, which is actually what made everybody else go there in first place? ARRRGGGH!

Zadie Smith on reading

More from Zadie Smith’s essay:

A novel is a two-way street, in which the labour required on either side is, in the end, equal. Reading, done properly, is every bit as tough as writing – I really believe that. As for those people who align reading with the essentially passive experience of watching television, they only wish to debase reading and readers. The more accurate analogy is that of the amateur musician placing her sheet music on the stand and preparing to play. She must use her own, hard-won, skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift she gives the composer and the composer gives her.

I’m going to start a series of posts on reading Any Day Now. After listening to a bunch of literary courses on audiobook and thinking hard about reading in building Unreads, I want to say some things about reading that relate to this topic. More soon.

Woohoo! A new Vikram Chandra book!

I happened on an article in Salon.com yesterday talking about Sacred Games, the new book by Vikram Chandra. You’re already excited, I know. He’s the author of one of my top 10 favorite books of all time, Red Earth and Pouring Rain. I used to go to the library and pick out a random book from the New Releases shelf to read. Red Earth’s cover, of a monkey with his arm resting on a typewriter, caught my eye and I absolutely fell in love with the book. After reading it for free I bought a copy, lost it somehow, and bought another one because I couldn’t bear not to have it available to read. That was in 1995. He released a book of short stories in ‘97 which I never got around to reading for some reason, then nothing until now. I just placed my order for Sacred Games with Amazon and I’m sure the temptation to dig into it as soon as it arrives will be strong. I’ve got 2 books from the library however (Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow and The Wizard of the Crow) so I’ll have to wait. I just hope Chandra’s next one doesn’t take so long, I’m already waiting for it.