Mid Year 2017 Reading Starts & Stops

Management

Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency, Tom Demarco — just bought this on my flight back from India but came recommended by a colleague.

Unlocking Potential: 7 Coaching Skills That Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations, Michael K. Simpson, Dr. Marshall Goldsmith — was a free Prime book so why not because as a leader, you can never read enough on coaching.

The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations, Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis, John Allspaw — didn’t buy this until the price came down and bought more as a reference than anything. If you’ve been doing DevOps for a while, this probably won’t grab you, but worth adding to your library and I’ll continue to plod through the chapters.

Technical

Terraform: Up & Running with Infrastructure as Code, Yevgeniy Brikman — broader in scope than Turnbull. More and more folks seem to be adopting Terraform over CloudFormation. Even though we haven’t adopted on my team, need to keep fit on this stuff.

Microservices: Flexible Software Architecture, Eberhard Wolff — had quite a bit of exposure to service development and implementation over the last 4–5 years and thought it was time to reflect and put in perspective.

The Go Programming Language, Alan A. A. Donovan, Brian W. Kernighan — in another life I want to write tools in Golang, so purchasing this makes me feel better (just like K&R C on my bookshelf.) Too bad I’m just a manager with tech ADD.

The Terraform Book: James Turnbull, Sid Orlando — I liked The Docker Book so gave this a try. Nice narrative intro, given the limitations of the Hashicorp docs.

Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud, Brendan Gregg — haven’t read through this but knew I needed to buy at some point and felt I needed some conceptual foundation for some performance tuning a few months back.

Military History

Coral and Brass: Holland M. Smith, Percy Finch — I’m a sucker for these $3.99 and below history books Amazon releases.

The Brave Ones: A Memoir of Hope, Pride and Military Service, Michael J. MacLeod — interesting (and much more positive) memoir of a 40-something journalist that joins the 82nd Airborne Division and writes about his tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Black Hearts: One Platoon’s Descent into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death, Jim Frederick — highly recommended and shows the breakdown of leadership from top to bottom within the 502nd Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne.

War in the South Pacific: Out in the Boondocks, U.S. Marines Tell Their Stories, James Horan, Gerold Frank — because I can never get enough of reading about U.S. Marines in the Pacific.