Happy New Year! It’s good to be back after taking a week+ off for Christmas. I cleared out the first part of my holiday reading backlog below, and you’ll find some useful pieces to start off the year.
[docs] Go REST Guide. The Standard Library. This is from JetBrains, and offers a very comprehensive look at three ways to build REST-based services in Go.
[blog] Amazon’s Silent Sacking. Yikes. No place is perfect, and we’ve got our own issues. But there do seem to be some fundamental items that need a reset at Amazon.
I had a great year. Not because of any one particular event. But I enjoyed some terrific time with family, had fun at work, learned a ton of new things, traveled to interesting places, developed some good habits, and gave away more than I spent. Who knows what 2024 holds, but I’m glad 2023 happened.
While I read a pile of books and wrote more than I have in years, I also felt like I did fewer things overall. For example, this was the first time in over a decade that I didn’t create any new Pluralsight courses, and I’m likely done with that season of life. I’ve been trying to do fewer things, better. Let’s take a look at some of the items I wrote this year, and the best books that I read.
Things I Wrote (or Said)
One of the main things I wrote this year was 229 editions of my daily reading list! I started the year aiming to share each day, and mostly achieved that.
The most fun “speaking” I got to do this year was at Google events. The Cloud Next ’23 dev keynote is a career highlight for me.
I also had the pleasure of delivering the Cloud update at Google I/O.
I finished 47 books this year, across the usual wide range of topics. A clear theme this year was “leadership” and I learned a lot.
Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness by Steve Magness. It “toughness” about being calloused and fearing nothing? This book says we have it wrong. It’s about making choices under discomfort while embracing reality, listening to our bodies, proactively responding, and transcending discomfort. Good read!
The Last Folk Hero: The Life and Myth of Bo Jackson by Jeff Pearlman. Bo was a freakish athlete who I grew up watching. He had a short “prime” period, as playing both sports simultaneously was grueling, but we’re better off for having seen him play.
Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building by Claire Hughes Johnson. If you’re building a team, scaling a team, or doing this for a whole company, this book is invaluable. I appreciated the frameworks and tips shared across a wide range of leadership dimensions.
Genghis: Birth of an Empire by Conn Iggulden. I read more historical fiction this year than ever, and boy, I really loved these two. This, and book 2 (Genghis: Lords of the Bow) were an absolutely engrossing look at what the early life of Genghis Khan was probably like, and how Mongolians lived at this time.
The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind by Jonah Berger. This book offered an outstanding reframing of persuasion. Instead of pushing people to change their minds, you become a catalyst and remove roadblocks. Very actionable stuff here.
Kydd: A Novel (Kydd Sea Adventures Book 1) by Julian Stockwin. More historical fiction! I also loved these stories about a man yanked into service at sea in the late 1700s. Great storytelling, and a compelling look at life aboard a ship at this time. I also read three more besides this one, including Artemis, Seaflower, and Mutiny.
MOVE: The 4-question Go-to-Market Framework by Sangram Vajre and Bryan Brown. My day job involved more focus on a full set of go-to-market strategies, and I wanted to gain more knowledge. This book offered a useful lens on the activities of the GTM process.
The Dark Hours by Michael Connelly. I’m a sucker for just about anything from Connelly. Harry Bosch is a legendary character at this point, and I’m becoming just as big a fan of Renée Ballard. I also read Desert Star, which featured these two.
Leading Leaders: How to Manage Smart, Talented, Rich, and Powerful People by Jeswald W. Salacuse. I’m in the enviable position of leading a team of senior folks and I want to be better at it. This book offered good guidance on strategic conversations, org integration, coaching, motivation, and more.
Loved: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products by Martina Lauchengco. The best companies do product marketing differently than others. The author does a terrific job looking at listening, positioning, and astutely applying GTM strategies.
Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God by Timothy Keller. Keller passed away this year, but left a giant legacy. I enjoyed this book about the why, when, and how of a fruitful prayer life.
Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II’s Greatest Rescue Mission by Hampton Sides. I’ve become somewhat obsessed with learning about the Pacific theater of WWII, and this story was phenomenal. The courage and resilience of the POWs in the Philippines, and those who rescued them, is remarkable.
Pompeii: A Novel by Robert Harris. I visited Pompeii this Summer with my son, and then wanted to learn more about this ancient city. This historical fiction about an aquarius in the days leading up to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius was a real page-turner.
Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business by Chet Richards. Agility and using your time advantage? That’s what good strategy does. I really enjoyed the historical lessons and applicable advice on creating a strategy that lets you play on your terms.
Truman by David McCullough. This is a big biography of one of the 20th century’s most consequential presidents. He came into a remarkably difficult situation after FDR’s death, and faced many hard decisions. I appreciated the details about Truman’s early years and what led him from humble beginnings to the highest office in the land.
Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design by Kat Holmes. One of my goals this year was to learn more about accessibility, and this book seemed like a good fit. This was a book about making intentional choices about inclusion (or exclusion) and the biases that limit who can participate. Very good read.
With the Old Breed by E.B. Sledge. I think this was the best book I read in 2023. I came across it after watching the miniseries The Pacific. Published over 40 years ago, this book is a visceral look at what war is like, and the toll it took on our men in WWII. It was an emotional and powerful read.
Babe: The Legend Comes to Life by Robert Creamer. The greatest baseball player ever? Statistically, it’s hard to argue. The Babe ushered in the home run era, and lived larger than life in Boston and New York. A tragic tale at times, but you get the sense that Ruth enjoyed the life he had.
Social Justice Fallacies by Thomas Sowell. Not a long book, but Sowell continues to be one of America’s great pragmatic thinkers. Are statistical disparities in representation and economic outcomes due to discrimination by dominant majorities? In this fact-filled book, Sowell explores this idea, and whether distant surrogates creating policies for justice are creating more harm than good.
Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments by Joe Posnanski. Ask baseball fans for the “50 most magical moments” and you’ll get all sorts of different answers. But I love Joe’s look at what stood out to him, and it reminded me of why this game still captivates me.
Wiring the Winning Organization by Gene Kim and Steve J. Spear. I recently wrote up a full book review, but pick up this book if you’re a leader or someone who influences how work gets done.
Marketing for Product-Led Growth by Steve LaChance. PLG is a powerful tool for product companies, and this was probably the most “highlighted” book on my Kindle this year. It’s full of advice on how to re-think the customer journey.
Hugger Mugger by Robert Parker. I read a few more Spencer books from Parker this year. It’s my guilty pleasure, and I usually finish them in a couple of days. This was the last one I read in 2023, and the gumshoe hasn’t lost a step.
The War That Doesn’t Say Its Name: The Unending Conflict in the Congo by Jason K. Stearns. I have a friend in Africa, and I realized I knew very little about what happens on the continent. This was a good book on the complex conditions that has made war in the Congo a fact of life.
The Servant: A Simple Story About the True Essence of Leadership by James C. Hunter. This story about a set of people at a leadership retreat resonated a lot with me. What does real leadership look like? It looks like love. Not the feeling, but the behavior. Patience, kindness, humility, selflessness, respectfulness, forgiveness, honesty, commitment. May we all lead this way in 2024.
Thanks for sticking with me for another year, and let’s find some excuses to engage in the year ahead.
That’s a wrap on 2023 for me. After today, I’m on leave until January 2nd and am taking a break from blogging and such. Thanks for sticking with me in 2023, and I plan on keeping this “daily reading list” going in 2024. I received some good feedback that folks find this useful, and I’ve enjoyed doing it. See you in the new year!
[blog] Best practices for consuming public Docker Hub content. There are tons of great images up on the Docker Hub, but you’re accepting risk when using public repositories. This post offers a few ways to reduce your risk.
[blog] Using Image Streaming with DockerHub. This is a powerful way to start up BIG containers quickly. Seconds instead of minutes. But does it work outside of Google’s own registries? I didn’t know about this pattern. Pretty cool.
[blog] VueFire is now stable. Web developers who like building with Vue will be happy to see that the cleaner integrations with Firebase are now ready to use.
##
Want to get this update sent to you every day? Subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email below:
Light reading day as I wrapped up work meetings, wrote a blog post, and spent some time building a generative AI app, using AI-assisted tooling. Fun stuff.
[blog] All Architects Must Deliver Business Outcomes. Do we segment “architects” too finely at times? Probably. Every architect should be a “business architect” if that means delivering something the organization as a whole cares about.
[blog] CNCF Cloud Native FinOps + Cloud Financial Management Microsurvey. People spend a lot of their cloud budget on Kubernetes. Why? Human factors like over provisioning, lack of accountability, and poor planning. Use fully managed Kubernetes wherever possible.
##
Want to get this update sent to you every day? Subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email below:
Are you still reading technology books? Or do you get your short-form insights from blogs and long-form perspectives from YouTube videos? While I buy fewer books about specific technologies—the landscape changes so fast!—I still regularly pick up tech and business books that explore a particular topic in depth. So when Gene Kim reached out to me in October about reading and reviewing his upcoming book, it was an easy “yes.”
You know Gene, right? Wrote the Phoenix Project?Unicorn Project? DevOps Handbook? I’ve always enjoyed his writing style and his way of using analogies and storytelling to make complex topics feel more approachable. Gene’s new book, written with Steven J Spear, is called Wiring the Winning Organization. This book isn’t for everyone, and that’s ok. Here were my five major takeaways after reading this book, and hopefully this helps you decide if you should pick up a copy.
The book could have been a 2-page paper, but I’m glad it wasn’t. The running joke with most business-focused books is that they contain a single good idea that somehow bloats to three hundred pages. Honestly, this book could have been delivered as a long online article. The idea is fairly straightforward: great organizational performance is tied to creating conditions for folks to do their best work, and this is done by creating efficient “social circuitry” that uses three key practices for solving problems. To be sure, Gene’s already published some articles containing bits from the book on topics like layers of work, social circuitry, and what “slowification” means. He could have stopped there. But this topic feels new to me, and it benefitted from the myriad case studies the authors used to make their case. Was it repetitive at times? Sure. But I think that was needed and it helped establish the framework.
I wouldn’t have liked this book fifteen years ago. Books like the Phoenix Project are for anyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re an architect, program lead, developer, sysadmin, or whatever, there’s something for you. And, it reads like a novel, so even if you don’t want to “learn” anything, it’s still entertaining. Wiring the Winning Organization is different. There are no heroes and villains. It’s more “study guide” than “beach read.” The book is specifically for those leading teams or those in horizontal roles (e.g. architects, security teams) that impact how cross-team work gets done. If I had started reading this when I was an individual contributor, I wouldn’t have liked it. Today, as a manager, it was compelling to me.
I have a new vocabulary to use. Every industry, company, and person has words or phrases of their own. And in tech, we’re particularly awful about over-using or mis-using terms so that they no longer mean anything. I’m looking at you, “DevOps”, “cloud”, and now “observability.” But I hope that a lot of folks read this book and start using a few of its terms. Social circuitry is a great one. The authors use this to refer to the “wiring” of a team and how knowledge and ideas flow. I’ve used this term a dozen times at work in the past month. The triplet of practices called out in the book—amplification (where are the problems) which results in slowificaion (create space for problem solving) and simplification (make problems themselves easier to solve)—should become common as well. The book introduced a handful of other phrasings that may catch on as well. That’s the hallmark of an impactful book.
A business strategy without a corresponding change in social circuitry is likely flawed. Early in the book, the authors make the point that we’ve been trained to think that competitive advantage comes from creating an unfair playing field resulting from superior understanding of Porter’s five forces. Or from having a better map of the territory than anyone else. Those things are important, but the book reinforces that you need leaders who “wire” the organization for success. Having the right people, the right tools, and a differentiated strategy may not be enough to win if the circuitry is off. What this tells me is that if companies announce big strategic pivots without a thoughtful change in org structure and circuitry, it’s unlikely to succeed.
Good management is deliberate. My biggest mistake (of many) in the early years of my management career was undervaluing the “management” aspect. Management isn’t a promotion for a job well done as an individual contributor; it’s a new job with entirely different responsibilities. Good managers activate their team, and constantly assess the environment for roadblocks. This book reminded me to think about how to create better amplification channels for my team so that we hear about problems sooner. It reminded me to embrace slowification and define space for thinking and experimentation outside of the regular operating channels. And it reminded me to ruthlessly pursue simplification and make it easier for my team to solve problems. The most important thing managers do is create conditions for great work!
I enjoyed the book. It changed some of my thinking and impacted how I work. If you grab a copy let me know!
As I complete tasks in front of me, I’m hoping to have some cycles on Wednesday or Thursday to experiment with new tech and build something. That feeling of seeing an app compile and start up is still a rush!
[blog] Ray on Vertex AI: Let’s get it started. Plenty of folks run frameworks like Ray on VMs or Kubernetes clusters. But if you want to run and scale AI and Python apps without worrying about infrastructure, this is a post worth reading.
[docs] Build hybrid and multicloud architectures using Google Cloud. What passes as “guidance” about hybrid and multicloud strategy in our industry is honestly pretty weak. You see some generic tips, but very little that’s actionable. This new three-part series in our docs is 140 pages of the best content I’ve seen on the topic.
[blog] Migrating from Cassandra to Bigtable at Latin America’s largest streaming service. A lift-and-shift migration to the cloud(s)—and maybe swapping a self-managed version of an infrastructure component for a managed version—is probably the safest bet. It’s also the least satisfying for most as they wonder why the performance, scale, and cost don’t match up with their expectations. This is a good story of a replatforming that paid off.
[blog] Product Predictions 2024. Spicy wisdom and opinions from Marty in this post. Product management might be in the “trough of disillusionment” right now for many leaders, but strong product leadership has never been more important.
I suspect that our bodies know when we’re “ready” to get sick. Last Friday, I had completed nearly all my big tasks for the year. So naturally, on Saturday I had 102.5 degree fever and slept for 10 hours. Feeling a bit better today, but I’m glad it’s going to be a quiet week!
[blog] Let Code Speak for Itself. I’m not a “no comments” guy; even well-written code can benefit from a little extra context. But this short post reminds us not to abuse comments.
[docs] About custom targets. I read through these docs related to new functionality in Google Cloud Deploy. This continuously deployment tool just added “custom targets” which lets you use sophisticated CD capabilities for a variety of destinations. Initial samples include Terraform, GitOps, and Vertex AI.
It’s the end of an exciting week at work, and if today is any indication, people are starting to wind down for the year. I’m ok with that. The content keeps coming though, and I read some great items today. See below!
[article] Why hasn’t LinkedIn moved to Azure? Sometimes, a move just isn’t necessary. Not all of Google runs on Google Cloud, nor does every Microsoft business run on Azure. If you’re already unbelievable at infrastructure and software in your current place, stay put. Snarkier take here.
[docs] Migrate from service account keys. These keys offer an easy way to access cloud services, but can also open you up to security risks. This is a good guide for those planning to migrate to an alternative.
[blog] The Thoughtful HIPPO. Excessive local empowerment is a trap! I think most of us appreciate leadership that sets direction and priority that helps us strategize accordingly.
Back to my regularly scheduled content consumption today after yesterday’s Gemini-fest. There’s a good chance you’re going to want to click through each one of these!
[article] How Much Do Companies Invest in Developer Productivity Teams? How big is your central dev productivity team? They seem to get smaller (as a percentage) as the number of engineers increases. This post also looks at what these teams actually do.
[blog] Self-Publishing as Technical Marketing. Many of you have thoughts and ideas that belong in a book. It’s never been easier to self-publish, as Adam explains here.
[blog] What’s Going On With Language Rankings? I enjoy the programming rankings that Redmonk does twice a year. It looks like generative AI tools, and developers’ changing relationship with Q&A sites, are messing with the results.
Today was all about Gemini and Duet AI for me. We made both available, with Duet AI for Developers reaching GA. I even did a little follow-along demo for it.
[blog] Bringing Gemini to Organizations Everywhere. It’s here and it’s great. Folks can now try Gemini out for themselves for free. There’s no place to get better models and better experiences for AI.
