While "Building Microservices" is not an encyclopedia, it definitely feels like one.

Conway’s Law states that systems are designed to mirror the communication structures of the organizations that create them. How, then, can we shape an organization to produce the desired system design? Let's find out "Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow" by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais.

As the year 2023 was coming to an end, I finally had some time to recap "The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering" by Fred Brooks. The book talks about software development fallacies from software engineering and project management perspectives. However this is not "yet another book". It was first published in 1975, nearly fifty years ago! So much changed since 1975, and yet, so little! It's unbelievable that today we are still struggling with the problems that haunted us in the age of mainframes.

You smile a lot as you read the book. Programming with punch cards? A big fat machine with only 2 MB of RAM? Software documented on paper? Sure, things were different back then. But there are so many similarities! Instead of reviewing the book, I'd prefer to study these similarities, draw parallels, and find out whether things have changed for the better.

DevOps Handbook is a fantastic guide for IT organizations, that describes the ways of improving the technology value stream - the process required to convert a business hypothesis into a technology-enabled service that delivers value to the customer.

Clean Architecture is the "Art of War" of the software industry. It was written by a professional who has been through many tough battles, both wins, and losses. Uncle Bob talks about timeless topics of software development that are just as applicable today as they were fifty years ago.

Doing things right doesn't matter unless you do the right thing. "Specification by Example" by Gojko Adzic is about delivering the right software. Adzic has interviewed many successful teams and discovered that their ways of software development are quite similar. These ways or processes are based on a close collaboration between all the parties, including business representatives. It begins by understanding the business goals. It continues with creating a specification and utilizing it for software development and verification. It is finalized by providing living documentation which reflects the current software state and behaviour.

"Specification by Example" helped me to understand how to do behaviour-driven development (BDD). It is an excellent reading for a software craftsman.

Refactoring is a book by Martin Fowler about what a fellow developer might describe as "a process of improving the code quality."

I highly recommend this book to software professionals who want to improve and formalise their refactoring skills.

"Turn The Ship Around!" is an exceptional book. It narrates a story of a poor-performing submarine becoming the best in a short period of time. It teaches the mechanisms of such transformation which involve the leader and the team alike.

Are you familiar with the gut feeling that the software development practices around you could be better? What if I told you that there is a solid scientific study on practices of low and high performing technology organizations?