Best computers & technology industry books according to redditors
We found 528 Reddit comments discussing the best computers & technology industry books. We ranked the 96 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
It would be a good idea to give the source where you took the text from. The book is called Blood, Sweat, and Pixel by Kotaku's Jason Schreier:
https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Sweat-Pixels-Triumphant-Turbulent-ebook/dp/B01NAKSWW1
The part you quoted is actually copy/pasted from my book, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, which is where this YouTuber got his information. This paraphrasing is also a bit misleading, because Hennig's team was playing with a lot of ideas, some of which might not have made it into the final game.
If you want the full story of Uncharted 4's development (plus the stories behind nine other games), you should check it out! https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Sweat-Pixels-Triumphant-Turbulent/dp/0062651234/
This is a great read as well. Highly recommend. A good insight into devops.
https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262509/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
Hes also the journalist who did the exposes on Athems development, and rockstars horrid working conditions, and the development state of diablo. And he literally wrote the book on modern game development. He has more internal sources than anyone else in the industry
and there WAS a new diablo game announced last blizzcon, just not the one people wanted
I imagine you're already aware of it given your interest, but in case you (or others) aren't Jason Schreier's book Blood, Sweat and Pixels has a whole chapter on Destiny's pre- and post-launch troubles. Schreier's the guy who broke the story on Anthem's awkward development just this week.
And the book Ready Player One in turn inspired Palmer Luckey during his Oculus building journey, and was a recommended read for new team members (according to the great book The History of the Future, which itself has a foreword by Ready Player One's author).
When you consider that they were forced by their publisher to make DA2 in only 16 freaking months. It is amazing to me that DA2 was even a playable video game, let alone anything resembling a good video game.
Then on top of that, DA:I was created in just 3 years, and Bioware was forced to use Frostbite, even though it had none of the tooling required to make an RPG. Sure if DA:I were going to be an FPS Frostbite would have been cool, but for the entire first year of development Frostbite was basically an unusable mess to everybody but the environment artists and level designers, and even then their work was just an educated guess because the level designers couldn't even playtest their levels, they jsut had to make levels that would probably work given knowlege about the broad strokes about how the game was supposed to wind up.
On top of all that, they were forced to scrap a ton of stuff in DA:I because it was mandeated that the game come out on PS3 and XB360, even though those platforms only wound up consisting of 10% of DA:I's sales.
They didn't even have Iron Bull implemented in the game until 8 months before ship. All of the play testing up until that point was without a fufll party, because the party system had to be developed in Frostbite specifically for that game.
"The biggest differentiator between a studio that creates a really high-quality game and a studio that doesn't isn't the quality of the team" said one person who worked on Destiny. "It's their dev tools. If you can take fifty shots on goal, and you're a pretty shitty hocky player, and I can take only three shots on goal and I'm Wayne Fucking Gretzky, You're probable going to do better. That's what tools are. It's how fast you can iterate, how stable are they, how robust are they, how easy it is as a nontechnical artist to move a thing."
Once again, it is incredible that DA:I resembles anything close to a decent game given the tools and timeline they were made to work with.
Reading Blood, Sweat and Pixels made me want to rip EA's eyes out.
If you's havent heard about it, i recommend picking up the book by Kotaku journalist /u/jasonschreier - 'BLOOD, SWEAT AND PIXELS', its available online and has a section all about the origins of Stardew Valley and lots of interesting insight (Such as how Barone learned to fake lighting in his video game due to his lack of knowledge around it)
The shit that gamers throw at devs on social media is unwarranted, transparency or none. Developers make games, and sometimes those games are good, sometimes they are bad, and sometimes it is or isn't their fault. Regardless, they still deserve to be treated like human beings.
Transparency is great; I love how Blizzard handles OW (that netcode video with the paper cups was awesome), and I think writing like Jason Schreier's Blood, Sweat, and Pixels are really cool and can help people understand the pressure and challenge of making any game, let alone a good one, but really, a lot of gamers need to grow the fuck up.
Yeah... but it's done by the writer of Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made. Each time he posts it's something worth reading, IMHO.
The whole known story of Destiny's development has been explored in great detail on Jason Schrier's book Blood, Sweat and Pixels.
To elaborate, when the Supercut (a 2 hour video detailing the story) was shown by Joe Staten, many thought it was a mess. But the problem was with the way the story was presented, not with the story itself.
In the book it's even stated that...
>“[Joe] made a big push for sanity and rationality,” said one former Bungie employee. “He basically said, ‘People, the supercut can be saved, [but] if we try to re-create the game in six months, it’s going to make a lot of people miserable.’” Staten’s efforts failed, though, and by the end of the summer, he was gone.
In the book itself you can also notice that the "original" Bungie, that Bungie that made all those Halo games that many players loved, slowly started losing the people that made it that while bringing newer people on board. So long story short, the Bungie that we have today making Destiny is not the same Bungie that made Halo.
It kinda reminds me of the Ship of Theseus paradox: if you gradualy replace all the parts of a legendary ship, will it still be the same ship of legends or will it be a new ship? On this case, I think we clearly got a new ship, and it's not a better one.
Grab the Phoenix book: https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592
This book has been suggested a few times so I finally got around to reading it. I think it has some good information in it. I'm only about halfway through it, but I like it so far.
Time Management for System Administrators
Other books would be any of the social books like "How to influence people", "7 healthy habits..." Etc.
I haven't read this one yet, but It has been suggested to me if you plan to go more into management/leadership Start with Why
Other books that have I have ear marked due to being mentioned:
Also, do a search for "Books for IT Professionals" to find a lot of other suggestions.
To those of you who are trading ETH, but aren't as familiar with the underlying tech of Ethereum as you'd like...
Read this book.
I just finished it because I wanted to be sure my foundational knowledge of the tech and Solidity were up to snuff. It's a cross disciplinary explanation of the tech, economics, and use cases of Ethereum. It's not a dry tech-manual, and is a rather quick read.
Side note for the lulz:
If you come from bitcoin land, you'll recognize the author of this upcoming tome.
The whole big story can be read in The History of the Future by Blake J. Harris https://www.amazon.com/History-Future-Facebook-Revolution-Virtual/dp/0062455966
I feel like this story could be a whole sequel to The Phoenix Project.
\> "can't we just install Google Tag Manager" - it's just a block of code in the <head> tag
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Things your dev will probably be thinking of:
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What's the performance like for this? Will this block the page load? Is this important? What kind of info is going to collect? Is this complaint with our privacy policy and how we collect info on our users?
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"Iit's just a block of code in the <head> tag" ... hosted where? From Google? Do we operate in China? Will we ever? Will their CDN work? Can we afford to be reliant on their CDN / resource? Does it work in all the browsers we support?
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Depending on the scope and reach, this could have a lot of stuff.
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\> "can't we install this countdown pixel on one of our servers? it's just a block of php code" link
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Do the servers run PHP? Should they? If not, would we need to install it? Who is going to keep that server patched? If it does, where do we put it? What are you using it for, emails?
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\> "can't we just have read only access to the database? just certain tables? such as a category data, so we can count/sum/group-by categories - what about a staging database - can't we use that?"
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Maybe a replica. As you've been told, you can't just run random queries since you could hurt performance without proper scheduling and permissions. This takes time. Privacy issues might prevent you from handling it without lawyers involved.
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Who now has to manage your access? How are the credentials issue? Are you machines secured enough to handle the data or is someone going to click a random link and now get backdoored and now some competitor has access to your info? Oops!
Aside from that...
\> To the marketing team, everything sounds easy "just copy paste this script"
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Sometimes it is. Often times, it is not. That being said, a lot of stuff can be very simple especially if it's a one off. You should organize time with your teams to get this kind of stuff. Where I work, we do help out with these requests but they are put in queue. However, you have to prove it's really going to help the business. You can't be wasting expensive resources chasing things that not going to return some kind of value for the business.
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If you REALLY want to understand, reach this cliche book: https://www.amazon.ca/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592 Judging by how you are talking, I am sure it will resonate with you.
I would be very cautious before you start this. You need to have a much better understanding of why you’re doing this before you start. I think breaking up ops teams may be an answer to a different question. That question should be: “how do I deliver better business value?”
The first step is to understand what you’re trying to achieve. Gene Kim, Patric Debois et al talk about the “three ways”. It’s essentially three steps towards embracing devops culture.
The first is all about increasing flow through the system - that system being your organisation. The idea is to look at how your organisation goes from a business need to realising business value. For instance, how do we go from wanting to provide another payment option on a website, to customers being able to use it?
One way of analysing and visualising your organisation as system is something called “value stream mapping”. This looks at how a piece of work gets requirements, gets developed and how it gets to customers (even if that’s internal customers). You need to understand the process, where the delays are, where teams hand off from one to another, where things go wrong. Ideally you want to optimise this process. One of the issues that many organisations look at just automation and essentially automate a slow and inherently crap process. This will never give the returns that many people are after. Looking at this level, you should be looking at organisation goals. How do you measure this work in a frame that other people are going to understand who are not IT? Is it how fast you can get a feature to market? Increasing individual spend? Increasing reliability of the service you provide to customers? If you’re not framing this initiative in those terms, then it’s doomed to failure. Be specific and measurable.
Once you understand your process, you can look at opportunities to optimise the feedback loops (the second way). It might be that infrastructure is required by dev teams that gets delivered by ops but isn’t what they need. There is a team hand-off here that needs to be addressed. There are many solutions to this problem, but it might be a start to move where the person provisioning that infrastructure sits. Put them in the dev team. You might still keep them as part of the ops team logically to start out with. The point is, you’re looking at the system, understanding the constraints and trying to optimise pain points.
You can achieve a lot without adding any new automation or technology solutions and this shouldn’t be underestimated, but ultimately, handcrafting systems isn’t repeatable or fast enough. This is where reorganising teams might look sensible, but you should know what outcomes you are string to achieve. That might be difficulties provisioning infrastructure fast or flexibly enough, it might be deployment of code to live being too slow, it might be that testing is too slow. Once you know you need improve, you can look at tooling to better achieve that.
/u/quailtop mentions:
>In my (admittedly limited) experience, you can solve needing faster development velocity (the first problem) through staffing a new team whose job it is to help improve the deploy, test and release process for all developer teams. Their job is necessarily cross-cutting across all dev teams. They would develop internal tooling e.g. a standardised build/release process that all teams can employ. This is a great pattern because it avoids encroaching on existing territory and is a very clear contract between engineering.
This is otherwise known as the DevOps “hub and spoke model” and is what my organisation has implemented. It’s worked very well for us and it’s a clever way to start a reorg.
For certain ops teams, you may want to keep them together. For example, you may have a large and complicated network setup and still need a dedicated networks team. My focus then, would be putting an obligation on those teams to allow others to better consume their services. They may need to add other people to this team to make that happen. For example, if you have a complicated network, with lots of steps, look at both automation of those steps but also to allow other teams to more effectively consume them. Amazon spent a lot of effort building the culture that ever system or service is an API that should be able to be consumed easily internally (have a read here: https://apievangelist.com/2012/01/12/the-secret-to-amazons-success-internal-apis/ . So, for this case, you may add a tech lead and some software engineers to build network APIs rather than splitting the team up. This may include some of your more traditional network admins to look at replacing on prem infrastructure to support this. The goal however, should always be about the organisation level goal. Improving the speed at which you can reliably deploy network changes should be in support of one of those strategic objectives.
The third way then focuses more on continual learning and experimentation. You should have embedded a set of objectives that you’re working on achieving but you’ll have lots of legacy systems, legacy processes and behaviours. Focusing on outcomes and consistent asking of “why?” will start to help. This is also where SRE becomes really relevant for me. IMO SRE isn’t something that is particularly useful to start out with. It’s best when you’re looking at elevating and existing DevOps culture to a new level. This will look more at observability of a systems and understanding where the more difficult optimisations can be done.
Let me be clear. DevOps is a long road for any organisation to change to. To really get mature it will take many, many years to properly bed in. My organisation started around 5 years ago and we still have more progress to make. One of which is to move from project based way of organising work to more long lived product teams. This organisational change is probably the biggest thing holding us back right now, and has nothing to do with automation or technical practices.
I wouldn’t start out by reading about SRE, I would start with a book called The Phoenix Project and then read The DevOps Handbook, at least twice. Start with the strategy before you make any changes. I would also look to see if you have a cloud strategy because many of these practices are much harder to implement purely on premise.
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Edit: Thanks for the silver!
Edit2: One thing that's also worth noting is that for many people, moving from traditional sysadmin to DevOps is a hugely scary change. It means that many of the staff won't have the job security they thought they had and they need crucial skills they don't have. To make this work, understand this point of view and support them. This requires really mature and experienced leadership at all levels. This is a good, short and free ebook to help the more traditional sysadmins understand why they have to change.
the cuckoo's egg by cliff stoll -- http://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espionage/dp/0743411463
takedown by john markoff and tsutomu shimomura -- http://www.amazon.com/Takedown-Pursuit-Americas-Computer-Outlaw/dp/0786889136
nonfiction, actually--early-computer-age stuff about chasing down hackers in the dot-matrix days. I enjoyed these when I was younger.
Check out Blood, Sweat and Pixels for a bit of in depth info about the creation of The Witcher 3 and the seriously humble beginnings of CD Projekt. It has several other stories of games being made in a crunch period as well, it's a great read.
> My boss is an understanding person and knows that we're stressed, but the larger organization seems uninterested in reorganizing to lessen our burden.
That's all you really need to know. You expressed a concern about the health of the team(s), and the broader org said "no, this is fine". They can live with all the benefits and consequences that come with that decision. All you need to know is whether or not you can live with all the benefits and consequences of that decision.
> Are most jobs like this?
I would say no, but practices that promote burnout aren't exactly uncommon -- toil is one example.
It's not uncommon for organizational practices/structures to foster high levels of burnout, but most orgs who give a shit will tend to fix those problems because turnover tends to be more expensive than simply fixing the problems that cause the turnover. Kinda sorta depends on the business's priorities, though. Showing the value of strategic investment in technical resources is ... difficult at times. I like the approach taken by Accelerate -- numbers and figures are what your manager needs to be focusing on, though it is hard to do when you're drowning already and engagement from leadership is low to non-existent anyway.
I wouldn't say it's the exact same, but I still lump it in a nice to read category:
The Phoenix Project
There's a whole chapter here about how much trouble DAI went through because of that janky engine.
https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Sweat-Pixels-Triumphant-Turbulent/dp/0062651234
Frostbite is a cancer. I'm hoping Jedi Fallen Order sells like hotcakes so that EA's forced to reckon that (a) single player games are relevant and (b) that non-Frostbite games are easier to develop.
Buy this book
Managed Services in a month
It covers moving from a break/fix to MSP very thoroughly.
They’ve done just that in The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations by the same author as The Phoenix Project.
> give a vague impression that they all do the same thing.
Lots of tooling does overlap but each one has one area it excels at - some excel at the same area.
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So, you have done a good job so far, it seems like most of your stuff is automated to a good degree and you have identified where your weaknesses are.
You should tackle one thing at a time, identify your largest bottle neck or problem and work to solve that first. In the same vain, only introduce one new tool at a time. Each takes some time to learn and to implement it correctly. Trying to do too much at once will just cause problems.
You have already identified the weaknesses so focus on solving these, starting with what you think is causing the most issues.
> - One server per environment is obviously not super scalable
Look into HA setups. How you do this and how much work it is depends on your application. Typically there are two parts to applications, work and state. Work (such as processing requests) is easy to scale if it contains no state. Just add another server to the environment and load balance between it. For this you need a loadbalancer (HAProxy or Nginx work well, though there are many others to chose from) and to move any state off the node you want to scale.
There are many forms of state, most will be stored in a database but you should also pay attention to session state which is sometimes stored in memory on the node - if you have anything like this you will need to do work to move it into some sort of storage, like a database or storage solution (such as your existing database or redis or memcached etc).
> - No sense of automatic provisioning, we do that "by hand" and write the IPs to a config file per environment
There are loads of tools to help with this.
Terraform for provisioning infrastructure.
Ansible or Chef or Saltstack or Puppet for provisioning nodes (I recommend starting with ansible, though any of them will work).
There is nothing wrong with using bash scripts to glue things together or even do provisioning while you learn to use these tools. I would not shy away from them, but do recognize the benefits each tool provides over just bash scripts. Take your time to learn them and stick with what you know and what works for you while you do. Introduce them a little bit at a time rather than trying to convert your entire infrastructure to use them in one go.
> - Small amounts of downtime per deploy, even if tests pass
This is easiest if you have a HA setup. You can do it without one but it involves just as much work and basically follows the same steps as creating a HA setup. In short, with multiple nodes you can upgrade them one at a time until everything has been upgraded. There are always some nodes running on either the old or new version so everything will continue to work.
You can either update nodes in place, or create new ones (if you have automated their provisioning) and delete the old ones when the new ones are up and working (see immutable infrastructure for this pattern, also canary deploys and blue/green deploys for different strategies).
> - If tests fail, manual intervention required (no rollback or anything) - though we do usually catch problems somewhere before production
Tests should be run before you deploy. These should run on a build server, or ideally a CI system. Ideally these should not only run before all deployments, but also for all commits to your code base. This way you can spot things failing much sooner and thus fix them when they are cheaper to fix. You also likely want to expand on the number of tests you do and what they cover (though this is always true).
Rollbacks should also be as easy as deploying the old version of the code. They should be no more complex than deploying any other version of your code.
> - Bash scripts to do all this get pretty hairy and stay that way
Nothing wrong with some bash scripts, work to keep them in order and replace them with better tooling as you learn/discover it.
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I have mentioned a few tools here, but there are many more depending on exactly the problems you need to solve. Tackle each problem one at a time and do your research around the areas you have identified. Learn the tools you think will be helpful before you try to put them in production (ie do some small scale trails for them to see if they are fit for purpose). Then slowly roll them out to your infrastructure, using them to control more and more things as you gain confidence in them.
For everything you have said there is no one solution and as long as you incrementally improve things towards the goal you have you will be adding a lot of value to your business.
For now you need to decide on which is the biggest problem you face and focus your efforts on solving that - or at least making it less of a problem for now so you can focus on the next biggest problem. Quite often you will resolve the same problems in different, hopefully better, ways as you learn more and as your overall infrastructure, developmental practices and knowledge improves.
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Also the 12 factor app is worth a read as is googles SRE book and the devops handbook. The Phenoix Project is also a good read.
Though these are more about the philosophy of DevOps, they are worth a read but wont solve your immediate issues. Reading around different topics is always a good idea, especially about what others have done to solve the problems you are facing. It will give you different perspectives and links to good tools you can use to solve the problems you face.
Guys, if you're interested in the making of Destiny, or stories like this in general, i encourage you to read Blood, Sweat, and Pixels. It is really good.
For me:
Freakonomics <- Showed me a different level of problem solving, via thinking about the motivation behind things.
The Icarus Deception & Linchpin <- Helped me realize I hate doing the work of a cog in a machine and that I enjoy my work if I get to express myself via creativity.
Currently reading:
How To Win Friends And Influence People <- It may be old, but it's still a great resource for human relations, even today. I don't know about most people around here, but I don't like only staring at my monitor 24-7. You can kind of think of it as the start to social engineering. You learn the correct inputs so that you may get the outputs you desire.
Bonus: Not sure if this counts, since it could be considered "technical":
The Phoenix Project <- If you ever interact with non-IT folks, you should read this book. If you are a non-IT person and interact with them, you should read this book. It shows you there are more ways then simply supporting a business that IT should be utilized. I read this after I'd been "doing devops" for a couple years already, and it really solidified a number of points. It's also a great talking point if you ever interview with someone who HAS read it. The only feedback I've received has been positive when I mention this book (to someone who has read it).
edit: words
http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/0671027034
http://www.amazon.com/Start-Why-Leaders-Inspire-Everyone/dp/1591846447
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143124986
There's a great chapter on Dragon Age Inquisition in "Blood, Sweat and Pixels" that covers this a bit. Probably sources from what you're talking about.
According to Accelerate https://www.amazon.co.uk/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Technology-Organizations/dp/1942788339
https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business-ebook/dp/B078Y98RG8/
Yes, I'm serious.
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Alternatively:
https://www.amazon.com/Network-Warrior-Everything-Need-Wasnt-ebook/dp/B004W8ZL3W/
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Oh, wait I missed your last sentence.
Come on, is /r/sysadmin really the best place you could think of for personal organization?
/r/GetOrganized
/r/organization
/r/organized
>While today you can develop a great game with descent graphics and story, etc for less than $100. Hell mods that can be the size and quality of real published games with entire campaigns, voice acting,multiplayer modes, etchave been produced costing nothing.
Lies. Especially that last thing.
You're making the mistake of assuming Time =/= Money. Time absolutely equals money.
Those "free" mods, with voice acting and all that, absolutely have a cost. Someone spent hundreds to thousands of hours setting it all up. Sometimes teams. Someone spent dozens to hundreds of hours reading out voices, and someone else made executive decisions on which reading to use. That all of the time was volunteered does not mean it cost nothing. Were it done by a business, every single person there would get a paycheck for their time.
Skyblivion was started in 2013. Assuming 30 hours were spent on it per week on average, between 2014 and 2018 you're looking at 6,240 hours. At $10 an hour (an underpaying rate) you're at $62,400 to make what they've made of it.
Comic Books take roughly 6 months from start to publication (if not more, some have their stories finished and ready to print 6 months ahead of the print date) and if there's only one artist and one writer (usually there's also an inker, sometimes two writers), you're looking at $84,000 a year for the pair. If you only get six months of work out of them, that's still $42,000, signifigantly more than your "few thousand" estimation. And that's before we even get in to printing and distribution costs.
The current average feature length budget for a Hollywood Film is between $70-90 million.
This book gives a figure of $10,000 per person per month to develop a game, meaning a 400 person team given 3 years for an AAA game would need $144,000,000 to make a game.
A 50 person team taking 2 years for a more A level game is going to use up $12,000,000.
And 5 people taking a year to make a little indie game need $600,000 to do it.
I.. uh.. don't see how Gaming is in any way falling behind.
/u/palmerlucky was working on this before he was fired, according to History of the Future.
You might want to read The Phoenix Project. It's an IT fable of a guy getting thrown into a management position in an absolute cluster... mess, and how he clawed his way out via process improvements.
I'm very much enjoying The Pheonix Project right now. It gives you a good view of DBA's (as well as other IT professionals) in the context of an entire IT department.
Highly recommend you read this book:
https://www.amazon.ca/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592
It details a fictional story around someone in a very similar situation to yours and is kind of a DevOps bible at the same time.
When Breath Becomes Air - Paul Kalanithi
Being Mortal - Atul Gawande
Better - Atul Gawande
Honestly anything by Atul Gawande
Start With Why- Simon Sinek (Just finished this one today. Phenomenal read. Not medicine related, but a great perspective on what leadership means and how you can inspire those around you)
The White Coat Investor - James Dahle (Financial literacy is always a good thing)
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I have quite a bit more book suggestions if you're ever curious, but those should keep you busy for a while. Feel free to DM me if you want more!
Excellent book for an introduction to what devops is all about. I worked at a devops consultancy for almost 3 years and we made everyone that joined read that book as well as the follow up, The Dev Ops handbook https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002
The devops handbook goes a little deeper into some of the technical ideas.
Blood, Sweat and Pixels
We're in the opening stages of buying out a large company. Similar sized (international, thousands of employees, dozens of sites all over the place) to us; but naturally there's months of procedure before the buyout is complete. Gov't approval, shareholders vote, board voting, etc. I'm not allowed to communicate with my counterparts at the incoming company, but have contacts in other industries that do business with both of us. I got word a couple weeks ago that their entire team in a specific IT specialty is quitting. They're all scared that my company is going to fire them all as soon as the ink dries.
First off, nothing could be further from the truth. My company may be an outlier, but we do lots of M&As every year; tempted to say 1-2 a month. Mostly small shops, but every now and then we bag a big one like this. Vulture capitalism is a real thing, but it makes up a very very small amount of buyout and mergers. You're still right to be scared, people are always fearful of change. Buying a new house/car, moving to a new place, taking a new job, etc. Perfectly natural.
I'll take a minute to hit on your core concerns:
> Everything I look after is old
So what? If the old hardware is still meeting its requirements in the production environment, that's fine. It's nice to have newer stuff, but I've never seen management update hardware simply because it was "old". If it was constantly at risk of losing customer data, or had unsolvable security concerns, then upgrading it to newer hardware would make sense.
About 1/3rd of my environment (+1500 servers) is what I would call ancient.... but they're still running. Supporting apps that customers use. Preforming some special process that needs specific hardware/software. In some cases, the team that owned the hardware was divested years ago and nobody told us to turn off their shit when they left. It kinda common. During the merger process, everything will be inventoried and documented, including what the server is actually doing (ie: hosting). This is where the curtain is lifted and suddenly we don't need to keep all these boxes running. The ones that do need to stay will get P2V'ed or V2V'd to better systems, if there's a reason it can't stay in its current environment.
> I get the feeling we're kept here temporarily to keep the old stuff running.
Yes, of course you are. Who else? Your team has the knowledge and experience keeping it all running. You're kinda stuck in a holding pattern though. Until the merger is complete, you can't get a job at the new company, and you can't move up at your current one. If you quit your job, you wont get a place at the new company, even if you fit the bill.
At my place, we do very little external hiring, and even then only for esoteric positions (IE: Lync Engineer, Sharepoint admin, Citrix, etc). M&A's are the primary source of our onboarding. Not just because you have experience with the current systems that the company is inheriting as part of the merger; but because you've played an important role in making your current company attractive to mine, which is what lead to the buyout. If your IT systems were shit, and always crashing/losing data, your company wouldn't have grown to the point where it'd be attractive to buy it out. Also, you're keeping these ancient systems running? Nice... obviously you know what you're doing.
Which brings me to the next part... have you met anyone from the new company's HR team yet? We always send in a team of people (directors, HR, advisors) to meet with the employees of the newly acquired company. Figure out who are the good apples and who are bad. Who knows what they're talking about and who is just faking it for the paycheck. If you haven't met with the other company yet, I'd strongly advise you to not jump ship yet. You could be throwing away an excellent opportunity just because you're scared of the pending change.
> Management is off-site.
This is perfectly normal. My manager is 1000mi away, and I only talk to him over Lync/email. Somehow we take care of all our datacenters, around the world, without having to see each other in person. But hey, this is the 21st century and this is how it works. The best people for the job may not live within 50mi of your office, but are within range of another office. If you need someone sitting in the same building to give you guidance on what needs to be done, then you need to ask yourself why. It shouldn't matter if your orders come over an email, a voicemail, or a sit-down meeting. In my experience, having remote management makes the subordinates much more responsible. They're allowed to get their job done their way, in their time (as long as it meets the metric of success), and then report success over an email/chat/call. Almost everyone I've met loves this kind of system. Much more laid back then say, a micromanaging boss who hovers over your desk and asks for constant updates.
> Pay is low, turnover rate high
This too is normal during your M&A. Accounting doesn't want to introduce extra financial liabilities for the new parent company, because it can throw off their forecasting models. Don't be surprised if you get the bare minimum until about ~6mo after the ink dries on the merger. This applies to new hardware, facilities requests, bonuses, perks, etc. It's not a bad sign... but it can be bad for morale. My suggestion is to just suck it up, because you're not going to win a fight with the accountants.
> Change management is more strict.
Get used to this in larger companies. Can you imagine the chaos of hundreds/thousands of people with their hands in thousands of servers? If a customer app goes down at 9am without CC, how do you figure out who did what where? Was it the app owners doing a code change? Was it the network team upgrading a switch? Was it security rolling out an update to the firewall? Change control saves your ass. I was befuddled by the process too when I started, but they've made a believer out of me.
Why should the company wake up 100 people in the middle of the night, to play Sherlock Holmes in the environment, looking for what has changed, because some developer made an opps?
[Also, if you've never read The Phoenix Project, I strongly recommend it. It'll give you a look at how a company without change control "tries" to get things done, and then you can see how change control, once properly implemented, makes everyone's lives soooooo much easier].
> What to do?
Nothing you've done at this point has been unreasonable. Like I said before, your reaction to the change in your company will naturally cause feelings of fear, anticipation, anxiety; which leads to second-guessing and the sense of flight. Your paycheck is at risk, which puts food on the table, gas in your car, and a roof over your head. Totally normal to be up late at night wondering what the future holds.
I'd suggest you get your CV updated... and also put together a portfolio. If/when the new company comes to visit, they'll want to meet with the team who has kept everything running and see if they can be integrated into the new company. You're not re-interviewing for your current job a la 'Office Space', they want to see if you can provide extra value to the company if given the chance. This is where you impress them with how you saved the day keeping X-system online, or how you automated something that used to take days, into minutes. Things like that.
I would NOT suggest signing a 1yr committal on a new lease with the intention of staying with the company. My advice is from someone who has sat on the other side of the table, and while I'm painting you a rosy picture because you've given me no reason to think less of you.... I will state that someone people will be laid off. Duplicate positions, fakers, incompatible team members, etc. Not everyone makes the cut. If you're a decent worker who can be taught new tricks, odds are on your side of being "asked" to join the new company (where you'll still do your current job, and take on more responsibility for a while, until we can find a way to reduce your criticality to the old entity).
tl;dr - Fear of uncertainty is normal. You don't have the full picture of what's going on behind the scenes. You'll see the writing on the wall IF layoffs are coming. Don't do anything rash.
Progression systems, squad controls, over-the-shoulder third person, and expansive environments all needed to be adapted to make Frostbite work with Inquisition and Andromeda.
Check out Jason Schreier's Blood, Sweat, and Pixels for some additional information. He has an entire chapter on what the Inquisiton team had to do to adapt Frostbite for Inquisition.
I agree though, my favorite parts of Inquisition and Andromeda are without a doubt the environmental design and the technical prowess behind any type of magical/biotic/tech explosions. Those games at their best look as good as any game I've ever played.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Phoenix-Project-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592
The phoenix project. it was a good book, not so much a reference book, but still has some valuable lessons in it.
Read 'Continuous Delivery', 'The DevOps handbook', and perhaps 'Accelerate'.
u/the_jixxx - sounds like a classic case of a good developer throwing shit over the wall and unintentionally not being a team plater. I'd suggest reading this book as it describes EXACTLY the situation you are describing: https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/1942788290
Your team/company will likely see a big benefit by moving to a more devops-style model of software development. Hope it helps you begin your journey
>I am unconvinced the report at ... really relates to high-quality software.
There are actually two stability metrics in the DevOps report. Mean time to recovery (MTTR) and Release Fail Rate. And while they are not something that people think of "quality" as a developer, I find it hard to believe that software of low internal quality could be released without massive pains. Both of which are lowest for high performers. When you listen to some talks by Jez Humble, who is one of the authors of the DevOps report, he says exactly what this article says. It is actually a core message of most of his talks.
Also, in the full book, they go into more details about actual technical practices and they find trunk-based development, developer-owned tests and refactoring correlates with high IT performance. And all of these practices are what Fowler and Humble associate with software quality. I really recommend reading the book, as the report is mostly condensed stuff for managers and executives to read between meetings.
In my mind, a DevOps PM is a technical role responsible for aligning project management (scrum masters), technology strategy, and developers. If the business says 'we want to push new code every 2 weeks' and 'we want the ability to A/B test different features,' it's up to the DevOps PM to make sure that the product is architected in such a way that this doable, make sure project management understands the challenges, track velocity for new releases, etc.
I'd recommend reading The Phoenix Project to learn more. A little outdated given the rise of cloud computing and microservices, but the ideas around agile and finding the most efficient way to release code still hold true today.
From Blood Sweat and Pixels:
"Every time I worked with Joe [Staten], I said, 'Joe, I'm really out in the dark here on where the story's going - I don't understand what's happening with the story, " [Marty] O'Donnel said. "And he would say that he was frustrated too. And at least what he told me was that he was frustrated with the lack of commitment from Jason. Jason would say, 'Yes this is good,' then a month later say, 'No, we shouldn't do this.' So there was a lot of what looked like indecision coming from Jason."
In the summer of 2013, months after Jones and Staten had hyped up the story of Destiny to press and weeks after [the gameplay trailer released at E3], O'Donnell went to the hospital to get sinus surgery. Just a few days after he got home, catastrophe began.
"I got a sort of panicked email from [Bungie's production director] Jonty Barnes saying, 'Oh my gosh, Joe released this supercut thing, and everybody's up in arms and worried about the story,'" O'Donnell said. "And I was lying on the couch, in a drug haze from recovering, and I was just sort of like, 'You've got to be kidding me. This is horrible.'"
Said "supercut thing" - or, as it was more commonly called, the supercut - was a two hour internal video that was meant to convey Destiny's entire story. To most observers, it was a mess. Staten had compiled and edited the supercut almost entirely on his own, peppering it with incomplete dialogue, half-finished voice acting, and rough animation. People at Bungie, many of whom were already nervous about the state of the game's story, found it impossible to understand.
In the supercut's version of Destiny's story, the player's main goal was to hunt down an artificially intelligent war machine named Rasputin, who had been kidnapped by the swarming, undead alien Hive. On the journey, the playuer would head to Earth, Venus, Mars, the Moon, Staturn, and a mystical temple on Mercury, where an Obi-Wan Kenobi-like wizard named Osiris would offer advice and words of wisdom. Along the way, the player would befriend and team up with characters like "The Crow," a suave alien with pale blue skin and slick hair [Note, the Crow's character model was repurposed to be Uldren].
Opinions varied on this story's quality, but almost everyone outside the writer's room agreed that the supercut itself was a disaster. "Joe's vision probably made tons of sense in his own mind," said Marty O'Donnell. "And Joe was just [thinking], 'Come on, everybody, we've all got to go in the same direction. We've got to star now. Here it is. This isn't perfect but we can fix it . . . ' Instead it backfired completely . . . Just about everybody in the studio thought, 'Oh my gosh, this is going to be a train wreck.'"
Perhaps by putting out the supercut, Joe Staten had hoped to force the studio's hand. Maybe he wanted to make Jason Jones and the rest of Bungie's leadership commit to a suingular vision for Destiny's story and stick to it. One former Bungie employee said Jones had actually requested that Staten make a presentation so they could all assess the state of the story. Few people at Bungie anticipated what would happen next.
Shortly after the supercut circulated, Jason Jones gave the studio a new edict: They needed to reboot the story. It was time to start over. Staten's story was too linear, Jones said, and too similar to Halo. Starting now, Jones told the studio, they were going to rewrite Destiny's story from scratch.
I sort of am on the fence of recommending these books but have you read?
Learning how businesses work definitely improves your tech skills. It helps build logic based around what is best for the business, not what is best for IT, or what is best for you. Learning how IT becomes a finely tuned oiled machine for your business is even better.
I have read some of the books on start ups and business so I can understand where they come from, what they are trying to accomplish as a business.
The soft skills will come as you work with more and more people. Just always try to walk into a situation as a neutral part, listen, observe, learn and don't be a jerk. The soft skills will develop pretty easily that way
Make sure you checkout What is DevOps? in the welcome section of this subreddit.
If you have some time, get your hands on The Phoenix Project as well. It will give you some perspective.
This is quite interesting so I will go ahead and put MAXIMUM EFFORT into it
chapter 1 - ikuto's talent would have gone unnoticed if chiyuki (someone born into the fashion industry) hadn't gone out of her way to hunt him down and then had a moment of self-realization "impossible probably".
chapter 2 - chiyuki's dad (an insider) happens to get a call from a former co-worker and decided to back ikuto who stood up to him for chiyuki's sake.
I have had me mentor pull some strings for me too when I used to work in research and academia...one phone call and I was having lunch with a top government official
chapter 4 - well he is a raw talent born in unfavorable circumstances which isn't unheard of in real life
chapter 5 - not unheard of...people in influential positions use opportunities to further kids all the time
chapter 6 - again, not unheard of...in fact, it is quite common in event management for things to fall in chaos when someone isn't able to come (either travel/overwork/sick)
chapter 7 & 8 - creative work is hard to....predict/control. There are moments when you shut down wondering how you managed to do it before and others where everything falls into it's place like a jigsaw
chapter 9 - not much of a cliffhanger here
chapter 10 - not unheard of...people managing the event and those managing the inventory have an instance of miscommunication. All events are susceptible to failure due to a lot moving parts
chapter 11, 12 - resolutions, no cliffhanger
chapter 13, 14 - MC mentions earlier (chapter 1) that he wanted to give up his dream because of his unfavorable circumstances...we were going to find out the full extend of it sooner or later
chapter 15 - I liked this one a lot...we have to wait a week before we find out the result of ikuto's self-reflection...chiyuki has her moment of self-reflection back in chapter 1.
Up until now, it's been been other people pushing him into it and he is responding to situations. Now he needs to figure out why he wants to be fashion designer. To be one is to design clothes that appeal to the masses, It isn't enough to want to make clothes (for his sisters/mom). He has the talent but it isn't good enough he needs to be obsessed about it to keep at it long enough.
Remember, chiyuki had other agencies willing to take her on or she could have compromised and moved into another profession where she wouldn't denied for being short. She chose her namesake, Mille Neige.
chapter 16 - resolutions, no cliffhanger
chapter 17 - cliffhanger...first one that is not set up well enough but I'd wait for the next chapter to pass judgement on it.
I have no idea about the fashion industry but I have heard people quitting companies in the middle or right before key events in the video game industry for health or creative differences.
>it so often just gets me rolling my eyes and sighing and this little last page dramatic twist cliff-hanger perfectly embodies why
I think you have been quite harsh in your assessment. I found none of the cliffhangers hard to believe/outlandish.
It's not like the MC fell on top of a female while she was in a public bath (every ecchi manga ever) or ran into his girlfriend's (and step-sister) step-sister and saw her underwear.
>At every turn it feels like the author is trying to use every little trick they can find to make things just a little more intense, more dramatic, as dramatic as they possibly can and it just ends up feeling overplayed.
I disagree...I could relate to it esp. working in a high stress environment. I mean sure the manga is structured in a fashion that maximises the impact but all of those things are quite common in industries like fashion, event management, animation, video games, research and academia which subsists on creative work and crunch (over working to meat deadlines that are hard to predict/pin down) is the norm.
If you ever happen to start things from scratch or attempt a startup, you will realize that more often than not find that one little thing or other can lead to near total collapse...it is dramatic by it's nature
You're not reading the right books. Very few people need to know about buses and registers. Try reading some books about computers that are written for a general audience by journalists. Some examples:
Hopefully they'll keep you engaged and you'll learn things in the process.
It's like Sarah jumped straight out of the book.
Definitely check out The Phoenix Project. I'm about halfway through it now and am really enjoying it!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0988262509/
The Phoenix Project, explains it in a novel format. https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592
A couple of good books that take on this question in detail are:
Superintelligence, by Nick Bostrom, who is a philosophy professor at Oxford, and
Life 3.0, by Max Tegmark, from MIT
The short of it is: we may be able to keep superintelligent AI with motivations not aligned with our own under control through restrictions on access to the outside world. However, superintelligent AI can, by definition, outsmart us, and may be able to figure a way to weasel out of any restrictions we put on it. The consequences of that could be very bad.
Therefore, it would be much safer for us to figure out how to design AI with motivations fundamentally aligned with our own.
This is a problem that researchers should probably start thinking seriously about now, since superintelligent AI development may turn into an arms race, and organizations may cut corners on safety unless there's already a body of work on the subject. To that end, Tegmark has been organizing science conferences on AI alignment, and organizations like MIRI are funding papers.
Taking the plunge to get rich on the other side of the crypto game.
Ordered Introducing Ethereum and Solidity: Foundations of Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Programming for Beginners
I've got some CS background and an aptitude for programming. As a mechanical engineer (currently), I'm most excited to get involved in projects like Grid+
Wow...
https://www.amazon.com/Start-Why-Leaders-Inspire-Everyone/dp/1591846447
Your fundamental problem is that you need to start with what you are trying to do, then work to get the data in the right shape to meet this need.
GOALS:
Show the availability of resources with a given skillset over time. You want to allow for resources to learn new skills.
DIMENSION TABLES
Now that we know what your goal is, let's look at the actors that you have defined to determine what dimensions you need.
"Show the availability of resources with a given skillset over time" The nouns in your goal will give you the dimensions that you need.
Employee- DIM_EMPLOYEE (don't call people resources... they just don't like it :) )
Skillset- DIM_SKILLSET
Time- DIM_DATE (if you are calculating availability down to the hour, then you will also need a DIM_TIME table)
FACT TABLES
"Show the availability of resources with a given skillset over time. You want to allow for resources to learn new skills." The verbs will give you what needs to go into your fact tables.
These fact tables will be a little tricky depending on how complex you want to make them.
Availability- you are looking to capture the availability of a resource and compare it to the demand for a given skill.
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but... unfortunately, I have to go. I will try to add some more to this later. Hopefully, this is enough to help you a little.
I’d also mention a great follow up would be the DevOps Handbook: https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002
I've been reading Chris Dannen's book, but I used this for the Hello World application.
I haven't looked at these yet, but here's a list I've been collecting from reddit/quora:
I'm going to second that recommendation. DevOps is a really versatile role and you'll want to make sure that you have a solid understanding of the scope involved so that you can confidently set expectations when applying for positions.
It's become a bit of a buzzword in the last year, but for a good reason since it is pretty much essential for agile development and overlaps strongly with architecture / infrastructure development.
There are two books by the same team of authors I strongly recommend reading, including non-referral amazon links below.
Okay, so my recommendation is similar to many others here, except that I'd say start with(get an audible subscription),
The Goal Audio Book by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
This is a really good book to start with, reasonably easy to listen to in audio format once you get rolling. It all started with this book! It's perfect start before you seque into
The Phoenix Project
It made for a pretty descent audio book as well. I powered through both of them while commuting. And I found it to be good enough.
DevOps HandBook
This however isn't quite as good as an audio book and you are better off with the book itself unless you are tight on time.
From there, this primer is pretty comprehensive to get you rolling,
[O'Reilly Learning Path: Modern DevOps] (https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/learning-path-modern/9781787280236/) which will cover a little bit of every technology you might be interested in. I haven't gone through this myself but it seems to have descent coverage, from the 3 ways, to git, containers, docker, kubernetes, ci(jenkins), swarm, aws, puppet, salt, testing, agile, compliance, etc etc..
As everyone else has mentioned, 12 Factor is a required reading.
And if you want a pretty deep dive on Docker, Docker Mastery: The Complete Toolset From a Docker Captain
Is well maintained. If you want to know AWS better, there are some descent udemy courses as well that you can pickup for $15. Anything from Ryan Kroonenburg is pretty descent. Side note Azure just started offering a managed kubernetes service that is now in preview its worth checking out.
From there, the only other thing I would say is to look at Terraform and every product by hashicorp and some more in depth content for
kubernetes and possibly Powershell if you are a windows person.
I think you're looking for a book called "The Phoenix Project". It is based on The Goal but focuses on visualizing the IT value chain in a company as if it were a factory floor. It also gives a solid understanding of the role of DevOps in companies.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1942788290/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0
Accelerate - https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Technology-Organizations/dp/1942788339/
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - https://www.amazon.com/Habits-Highly-Effective-People-Powerful/dp/0743269519
Extreme Ownership - https://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Ownership-U-S-Navy-SEALs/dp/1760558206/
It's kind of dumb but there are two different "CD"s.
The first level is CI, which is committing code and having something that builds it automatically and runs all the tests.
The next level is CD (Continuous Delivery), which is a process that takes your successful integration builds and pushes them out to some set of environments (e.g. UAT or staging or whatever). From there you might have some set of additional tests that run, maybe load tests or integration tests with live external systems.
The third level is CD (Continuous Deployment), which is a process that takes your successful delivery builds and automatically pushes them to production.
In a true continuous deployment pipeline there's no gating step where people sign off on UAT (this doesn't mean there's no people involved anywhere, for example code review pre-merge is fine). You write your tests, you merge your changes, and if everything passes the changes just show up in production.
The part of your process that makes it not "true CD" is the human sign off in UAT.
That being said, TRUE AUTOMATED CD IS NOT RIGHT FOR ALL SITUATIONS! There are many business reasons that you might not want to or be able to apply a true continuous deployment model.
IMO the best book on this stuff that's out right now is https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1942788339
I read about him in Blood, Sweat, and Pixels
...and after you've read the ME:A article, pick up a copy of Blood, Sweat, and Pixels by Jason Schreier for the -now familiar- development story behind Dragon Age Inquisition.
An entire book, The History of the Future comes out tomorrow. It will cover this and the rest of Oculus's history. Supposedly it's really detailed. My copy isn't expected to get here until next Monday :(
"The History of the Future"
This. Well i listened to the audiobook on the way into work!
Obligatory referral for reading the Phoenix Project.
https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592
What you want to do is engineer your systems such that "Maintenance Windows" are not a thing. You might want to look into SRE and DevOps techniques.
First, go read The Phoenix Project. A quick read that novelizes process workflow concepts really well.
Personally, I use a Kanban board to make sure projects are moving along. In conjunction with a ticketing system (which is a great log but poor visual representation of how projects or long tasks are going) it works great and is visible enough that my CEO often walks in and takes a look at our "current status." Would be worth looking into as initial investment is low (mine is a whiteboard and some colored post it notes; more elegant and online solutions are plentiful).
> What is to truly do?
Dunno. But, I've been retired for a while now and am seriously enjoying it!
I went to a lecture and book signing, but haven't yet read the book, called
Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark. It explores this topic in depth.
We need to, at a minimum:
There were many more points on the topic that were made by Max Tegmark at the lecture. I expect there are even more in the book. When my wife is done with it, I'll start reading it.
You should check out Jason Shreiers "Blood, Sweat, and Pixels." Recommended read for anyone interested in development.
Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062651234/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_0m3eAbXMVFBFM
You might also be interested in Jason Schreiers article covering Destiny's messy messy development. http://kotaku.com/the-messy-true-story-behind-the-making-of-destiny-1737556731
And also interesting(maybe?): he's going to publish a book covering all of these stories and more later this year, named blood sweat and pixels. https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Sweat-Pixels-Triumphant-Turbulent/dp/0062651234
I'm a technical PM for two teams, as a well a contributing dev on both teams.
While the skills are definitely different from programming a few things I've found that helps:
A few books you should read:
In terms of sprint plannings, just remember it's a negotiation. You're not there to tell people what to do. Rather you have the stuff you would like done, but you negotiate with the team on what's possible and what's not. I've seen too many PM's get pissed cause their teams couldn't do 100% of what they wanted and that's not right. Rather a good PM, imo, brings options and lets the team decide how much they can handle. There have been times when I've gone into sprint plannings and non of items made it on the sprint, and that's ok.
Sorry for the long rant!
Change control issues automatically make me think of Phoenix Project.
A great read for anybody in IT.
I've posted this before but I'll repost it here:
Now in terms of the question that you ask in the title - this is what I recommend:
Job Interview Prep
Junior Software Engineer Reading List
Read This First
Fundementals
Understanding Professional Software Environments
Mentality
History
Mid Level Software Engineer Reading List
Read This First
Fundementals
Software Design
Software Engineering Skill Sets
Databases
User Experience
Mentality
History
Specialist Skills
In spite of the fact that many of these won't apply to your specific job I still recommend reading them for the insight, they'll give you into programming language and technology design.
Masters of Doom was a good read.
While not about video games, Dreaming in Code is close to the spirit of the wired article.
This book just arrived by mail to me: https://www.amazon.com/Introducing-Ethereum-Solidity-Foundations-Cryptocurrency/dp/1484225341. Someone here who has read it?
>I feel as though I'm going to be "messing up" alot with clients.
yes. A lot. It's normal
BA in kin would be a waste of time unless you plan on doing physical therapy or want to work in more clinical settings.
I'd suggest reading and messing up with clients; it's the only way you'll learn. Two books that offer fairly different, but great, base beliefs as well as programming are
Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe
New Functional Training for Sports 2nd Edition by Mike Boyle
as well as Start with Why
Book recommendation: https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Technology-Organizations/dp/1942788339
This book is not directly related to agile. But it is rather unique, because it is based on studies and not on authors subjective opinion. It tries to figure out, which mechanics are relevant for modern software development teams.
Most often our rituals are not based on evidence. They are originally based on convenience and afterwards kept up as dogma. Sadly the original introduction was often done by the wrong people.
For example agile was mostly invented by developers, but the widespread adoption of scrum was done by business people (managers as scrum master). As such a dogma was formed that may not be in the best interest of solid software engineering.
I second this recommendation. It’s also worth noting that it has been revised and updated.
I've read many video game history books, they all have this anecdote in them but none have any real proof. However, the NES originally launched in New York City and Nintendo had to make the promise to stores they'd buy back all unsold stock. So that does help support the claim a little.
btw, Game Over is an awesome read.
I picked this book up in March, and I think it's very well done:
Introducing Ethereum and Solidity: Foundations of Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Programming for Beginners
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XQFYL2M/ref=oh_aui_d_detailpage_o08_?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1
I'm going to suggest a few books that aren't textbooks that'll teach you a specific topic but are certainly brilliant at passing on viewpoints that are beneficial to your overall understanding of computer science and software development.
Won't directly help with your specific question, but go and buy these books right now :-
https://www.amazon.ca/Managing-Humans-Humorous-Software-Engineering/dp/1430243147
https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/1491932058/
https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/1491973897
Founders at Work
http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/dp/1590597141
Are your customers loyal clients or just one time clients.
Go read / listen to this book. Talks a bit about it.
https://www.amazon.com/Start-Why-Leaders-Inspire-Everyone/dp/1591846447
Only one title of overlap, nice.
Out of your list, where would you start? Have you read any other in our original list?
Built to Sell, John Warrillow
The Automatic Customer, John Warrillow
How to Sell at Margins Higher Than Your Competitors, Lawrence Steinmetz
Start With Why, Simon Sinek
Leaders Eat Last, Simon Sinek
The E-Myth Revisited, Michael Gerber
Selling the Invisible, Harry Beckwith
What Clients Love, Harry Beckwith
Question Based Selling, Tom Freese
The Phoenix Project and The DevOps Handbook by Gene Kim would be the ones I know of.
https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592
https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002
https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002
Tell your manager to read this fucking book: https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002
I'm a software engineer and not in DevOps. However, one of the managers at the company where I work encourages all the developers to read The Phoenix Project, and if/when they finish that she gives them a copy of The DevOps Handbook.
I'm about halfway through the former and haven't started the latter. The Phoenix Project is a novel, but it's kind of like one of those novels with a message, in this case the message is how to be part of a successful IT department at a modern company.
Hello,
From my experience, the tool selected for a project will always become the wrong choice after a certain period of time. It is never obvious which tool is the best at the beginning of a project. An experimented team will more likely make reasonable choices but they should always keep in mind that the tool they use will be replaced at some points or modified. That's why architecture and good coding practice are the cornerstones of a project able to withstand evolution.
I had to work, one day, on the transition from SQL to MongoDB. There is no magic, all the code calling the SQL data source had to be rewritten. It is a costly process but the final cost of the operation mainly depends on how well the calls to the database are isolated from the rest of the software.
Sadly, I don't have any tools for handling this specific case. But I can recommend those books :
First, read our Wiki. It is very thorough and answers a lot of these common questions such as
day to day? The Practice of System and Network Administration
And the topical reference books listed below.
Books to help in shaping a sysadmin? The above &:
The Phoenix Project
Time Management for System Administrators
Topical Books I see mentioned often and have been very helpful to me:
Powershell in a month of lunches
Learn Python the hard way
Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook
Windows Server 2016: Inside Out
Group Policy
AbsoluteBSD
FreeBSD mastery:ZFS
CCNA
RHCSA/RHCE
Pro Puppet
SSH Mastery
On my docket:
FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS
Michael W. Lucas and Thomas Limoncelli are very good sysadmin writers, you can't go wrong with a topic they have chosen to write about.
Most of the *nix stuff assumes a baseline knowledge of how to use a unix-based system. I learned as I went but did pick up an old copy of Unix Visual Quickstart Guide not too long ago at a used books sale, which seems like a good starting place for someone overwhelmed with sitting at a terminal and being productive.
I notice I don't have any Virtualization books, perhaps someone else can fill in good books. Most of my knowledge regarding virtualization and network storage has been a mix of official docs, video training, and poking at it. Seems innate but it isn't.
It's really what works for you, this is the fundamental point of Agile which often gets lost, so if it's working for you that's perfect.
For our teams LEAN makes far more sense. As an example, Kanban replaces velocity with constraints. It makes it immediately obvious which parts of the process are bottlenecks.
Our priorities are set by the business on an available slot basis. We might be able to simultaneously work on three features. If three features are in flight there's zero capacity. The business can pause or abandon a feature, but they have to agree this by quorum (or dictatorially, hierarchy still exists :) ). Once a feature is complete a slot is available and the business can vote on what feature they want next.
So a feature takes as long as a feature takes. We still estimate, but there's no arbitrary sprint boundary to estimate around. We still subdivide tasks as an aid to estimation but again, not to fit in a sprint boundary.
We do stand ups (standing optional) in the morning, still meet as a team, but there's no need for a retrospective. If we are constrained by unanticipated volumes of support, or the task requires input from the business, the task sits in that column so we can see each day that support needs addressing or that someone needs chasing.
There's no formal backlog, the business set their priorities. This doesn't mean the team lead can't meet with the business, discuss future requirements and liaise with the team for informal estimates, complexities, etc. It sounds kind of chaotic but it works across many teams, although interestingly we still use scrum for the sort of transformational, multiyear multi team coordination.
If you're interested in taking a look at this, even if it's just to compare and contrast, take a look at this book. It covers pretty much all the above and a bunch of dev oppsy stuff in novel form. It's not dumbed down, and it is number 1 in its category.
> Should we start learning how to build for Android, iOS, or some cross-platform tool? What are trade offs for each?
For instance https://ionicframework.com/
But honestly, as long as you don't need to develop native, as /u/Xen0_n mentioned, I'd go with a progressive web app. You write it once and it runs in all modern browsers. You also have access to e.g. GPS, can send push notifications, etc. But make sure, a PWA provides all the technical features you need! (Proof of Concept! -> I need to decide on the tech stack by the end of this month)
It's also important to consider your team's abilities. If everyone is a python developer, don't use c#. If everyone knows angular, React is probably the wrong decision. If there's not enough knowledge and experience present in the team - the people of a team can usually give quite good feedback about technologies (complexity, learning curve, if it's fun to work with it)
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>What are common components of an app's architecture that we will likely have to think about? I know we'll need a front end and a back end with a database, but I'm guessing we'll need to consider things like communications with the server storing the database? -How do apps link these components together/let them talk to each other?
Usually Multitier architecture. E.g. the front end communicates with a REST-api, rest API with a business layer, business layer with a persistency layer. What you use (programming language and back end) will determine how the communication will work. With Java and a relational database it will be most likely be JDBC with the given driver of the DBMS.
But also think about the cloud - this has some impact on the software architecture (aka could readiness).
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>What are common mistakes when making early design decisions that cost you down the line in efficiency and maintainability?
From my experience:
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> What should our development process look like? Simultaneous front end and back end development? Back end before front end?
Don't split the team into front end and back end if you can avoid it. Only if the team is getting too large to be effective, a split should be considered - having two teams will usually end up in finger pointing. Better is to code by feature. And split up a feature into smaller tasks (work in small batches), think about MVP: A small batch which already generates value to the customer and also generates feedback. It doesn't need to be feedback from production, but can be from a customer.
How you write and deliver software - from requirements engineering, UX testing, actual coding and whatnot to deployment into production - is a really large subject. And there's no 'one size fits all'-approach - every environment is different. I'm a disciple of agile software development: The Manifesto for Agile Software Development and Continuous Delivery (and: Accelerate).
Important is, that you guys always improve the process (as in continuous improvement). Not only within the team, but also and especially with the customer.
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Another thing: Don't forget security. The outcome of a security audit can be painfully expensive.
Oh wow, great question! I've pondered this quite a bit and am currently reading up on two resources to deepen my understanding:
Stripe's Developer Coefficient report: https://stripe.com/files/reports/the-developer-coefficient.pdf
Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Technology-Organizations/dp/1942788339
It's kind of a wordy title for that book, but it's interesting to see what the authors deem to be the really key things for safely accelerating development velocity. We've addressed a lot of the things in the book via intuition over the years but I really would love for us to start being more methodical and process oriented in trying to improve things. I'd be interested to hear what you think!
I'd love to have some metric that represented how "sure" developers feel when they are developing new services/features and estimating timelines as well as how "sure" they are about deploying changes without having unplanned reverts and things of that nature.
That sounds tricky. I think you're starting with the right place: visualizing workflow;
A suggestion is that you focus on building trust by addressing pain points. What pains does the team have with the current process and can you concretely improve those in the short run (as opposed to abstractly saying "if we adopt this whole enchilada that will get better, trust me").
Another thing to focus on is measuring some of the health indicators in Accelerate. Honestly, you might be doing awesome already and the problem to be solved is recognizing and celebrating it. Good luck!
It is. Really good book. Long, super detailed. I got my copy back in the early 2000s but never finished it. After Hiroshi Yamauchi passed away, I dug it up and re-read it in full. Really glad I did.
It's long out of print, but there might be some used copies floating around. I did notice it's on Kindle:
http://www.amazon.com/Game-Over-Nintendo-Conquered-World-ebook/dp/B0060AY98I/
Totally worth $10, a must read for any Nintendo fan.
There are at least three books published about the History of Nintendo. I'd say start with Game Over by David Sheff. Here's one listing of an apparently out of print version, any decent sized library should have a copy.
https://www.amazon.com/Game-Over-Nintendo-Conquered-World-ebook/dp/B0060AY98I/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1503836937&amp;sr=8-2&amp;keywords=game+over+book
That's not quite the case. I would recommend you give "Blood, Sweat, and Pixels" a read, it has a chapter on Destiny and if that book is to be believed then it was mostly just a mess of Bungie's own making.
Introducing Ethereum and Solidity. Chris Dannen
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XQFYL2M/ref=oh_aui_d_detailpage_o01_?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1
I agree with /u/NoyzMaker that you'll have to leave to get away from this. On your way out, toss this book on your boss' desk:
The Phoenix Project
It's a story about almost exactly the same situation you're in.
One possible reason but it doesn't sound like it quite fits, I read this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business-ebook/dp/B078Y98RG8/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=phoenix+project+devops&amp;qid=1554156363&amp;s=gateway&amp;sr=8-1
About a guy trying to turn around a dysfunctional it department, and one of his concerns is that everything depends on this one tech guy who knows everything, and no one can get anything done without consulting this one guy, so he takes various measures to basically ease the guy out of the various processes and force the rest of the team to fly on their own and develop their own skills.
The book comes out next Tuesday and sounds interesting.
Rockstar gets a lot of deserved flack, but according to this book CDPR don't do unpaid overtime like nearly all American studios do.
D1's launch was the result of a combination of multiple factors. Including changing trends in the gaming industry and a rocky development. NOT the source, initial cause or root of the trends you are perceiving.
For more on this:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062651234/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_awdo_jsBOzbXZTSWFV
If you want a good example of Bungie's development problems, read the Destiny portion of Jason Schreier's book, Blood, Sweat, & Pixels.
But yea, they seem to be a poorly managed studio. They take way longer than most studios to patch the game. They take months to do small sandbox updates, while letting some problems just go on forever (OEM, seriously wtf?). They have about 600 employees, according to Luke's interview prior to Shadowkeep. That's 2-3 times more than studios like Santa Monica (God of War) or Naughty Dog (TLOU). Sure, they do a 'live service' game.. but come on.
I'm partial to Cloudera or Horton Works. Both have training courses.
I personally like good 'ol books. I've taken the Coursera intro and Hive/Pig training courses and while they were invaluable, nothing quite replaces sitting down and working your way through books like Hadoop: The Defininitive Guide or MongoDB: The Definitive Guide. I highly recommend Safari Books Online if you enjoy online reading. Perhaps some of your professional development money could go to paying for an account for that. For those who don't have the money for that, don't underestimate the usefulness of your public library. I currently have 3 books out from my local library on graph/network science (Linked is awesome and a great start for anyone interested in Networks/Graphs).
One thing I'll mention is that Hadoop has really become more of an ecosystem than a produce. HDFS, MapReduce, Pig, Hive, Sqoop, Flume, HBase, Storm, etc. Just saying "Hadoop" is like just saying JQuery. Half the battle with JQuery is knowing how to use the best plugins. It's the same with Hadoop.
Somebody in another comment mentioned Kevin Mitnick.
In addition to Mitnick's book, I'll also recommend:
Steven Levy's Hackers. It's a classic exploration of the birth of the computer age and hacker culture, with a lot of insights into the mindset of computer people, both white-hat and black-hat.
The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll, which is an account of him tracking down some serious hackers waaay back in the day. It's kind of vintage now, but I remember it being very well written and engaging. It's more like reading a novel than some dry academic piece.
In similar vein is Takedown, by Tsutomu Shimomura, which is Shimomura's account of pursuing and catching Kevin Mitnick. Also quite good, as it was co-written by John Markoff. There's a whiff of Shimomura tooting his own horn in it, but you definitely get a feel for the chase as it was happening, and learn a lot about the details of what Mitnick (and others in the underground hacking world) were actually doing.
Weird fact: I had no idea at the time, of course, but during some of Mitnick's last days before they nabbed him, he lived in an apartment building in my neighborhood in Seattle, right across from the grocery store where I always shopped. And about a year later, I ended up dating a girl who lived in that same building at that time, though of course she had no idea Mitnick was there either or even who he was. Still, I always wonder if I ever happened to stand next to him in line at the grocery store or something like that.
What do you mean? The book I read came out in 1996.
The Foundation Bible of starting an MSP: Managed Services in a Month by Karl Palachuk Amazon Link
I'll also throw a vote in for Traction as a general business book.
And my personal people/team management bible that I bring into every company I work with: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Amazon Link
Your audible link takes me to a redirect and just shows the main page, is this the book you are referring to? Managed Services in a Month - Build a Successful It Service Business in 30 Days - 2nd Ed
This is a great book, you should get it.
And, if you're starting out, get Managed Services in a Month https://amzn.com/0981997856
Both you and your boss should read this "fictional book" so that you are both on the same page.
The Phoenix project is the best description of the problem that devops is trying to solve IMHO.
https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262509/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1484364343&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=phoenix+project
I would need more information from you before I could make some solid recommendations.
by 'adopt agile methodologies' do you mean your company just said 'we want to be agile now. go make it happen.' or have you already made the commitment to hire an agile coach? how big is your dev organization? are we looking at 2 or 3 teams of ~10 people each? or are we looking more at 15 teams with 10 each?
You personally should also try to understand what Agile is and what it isn't. after that, you should try to understand what scrum is and what it isn't. with this information you'll be able to figure out what you need to brush up on and dig into.
---------------
Some general things to know:
the scrum training/certification shows bare minimum exposure to knowledge to begin practicing. IE: you should never assume that anyone that has gone through training knows how to implement Scrum in an organization. This includes yourself. At best, the cert means you have enough knowledge to talk about Scrum, and could practice scrum in an environment where it is already in place. it is not a good measure of your ability to aid a company in an agile transformation.
Aglie/Scrum is not a magic bullet. it takes a lot of hardwork and effort to make it work. It's better than what you're doing. but one of the key things Agile/Scrum does is bring the problems you have to the surface so you can fix them. IE: if it doesn't hurt, you're probably not doing it right. be prepared. you've been doing a lot of work that enables bad process. you're going to see all of it in painful, excruciating detail. Focus on fixing the process and making it the way it should be, even if that means slowing WAY down on getting product out the door. depending on the size of your organization, it may be a full year before you really start to see major benefit. it might take you 6 months to fix all of your broken processes and break even with where you are now. Keep in mind, that fixing some of the broken might include an increase in scope to some people's jobs. Don't take shortcuts. you're not doing yourselves any favors by trying to cut corners and implement faster. the transformation will put strain on the weakest parts of your process. it's supposed to.
No series of courses is going to prepare you to spearhead a transformation. You will need expert help, it's not something you can easily stumble through. it becomes more difficult the bigger your organization is. and keep in mind, that the transformation isn't segregated to development only. it will have repercussions in marketing, sales, etc. There is a reason a company is expected to hire a dedicated person as a scrum master (as opposed to having a dev manager that acts as scrum master).
read these two books:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262509/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1465834584&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=phoenix+project
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lean-Trenches-Managing-Large-Scale-Projects/dp/1934356859/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1465834595&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=lean+from+the+trenches
If you're going to be the main driver of transformation, you're better off reading those two books than undergoing scrum training. they will give you a more complete understanding of what you're trying to do.
Don't know what specific field you are in, but if you have an IT focus at all I STRONGLY recommend the Phoenix Project by Gene Kim and Kevin Behr. It's a non fiction approach to IT management wrapped in a fictional story. Anyone who has worked in any sort of IT related field will relate strongly to the first half of the book.
This is a great (and short) introduction to what the DevOps mentality is. You and your boss should read it before you start hiring "DevOps Engineers".
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0988262509?keywords=devops%20books&amp;qid=1457046991&amp;ref_=sr_1_1&amp;sr=8-1
It's not a "thing" but a philosophy on making sure Developers and Operations (SysAdmins) work together within your organization.
Not itcher, but also recommend it. https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592
The Phoenix Project sets its main villain as the manager of the security department who can't see the forest for the trees.
Spoiler alert: He shaves his head, achieves enlightenment and all is saved.
I highly recommend starting with The Phoenix Project. Don't pass by this book just because it says "DevOps" in the title. It quite specifically addresses the ideas of change management, why they are important for IT, and more importantly why they are important for the business.
Then once you're sure you're ready for Change Management, The Visible Ops Handbook is a more prescriptive book that will help you on the beginning stages of implementing Change Management.
Read this book
>Fast forward 4 months to the present, and I have had barely any time to work on any aspect of this certification during normal working hours (I mean within the 40 hours per week that is the traditional work limit for employees). I have had a little time to work on the certification in the office, but at least half of my work for this has occurred outside of the 40 hours.
Sounds like your problem isn't ISO certification, but an issue with workload management.
>Since this is a sysadmin job, I have also had to work outside of the 40 hours on other critical tasks (fixing crashed servers, patching servers, installing network devices, etc).
Sounds like your problem is really this. Do you have any sort of patch management systems in place? Do you have automation setup with stuff like puppet, chef, or salt, etc?
Do you have staff in your team that are wasting time, or could take work off you?
Are you just applying bandaid solutions where you really need to fix the underlying issue with faults, etc? What about preventative maintenance, etc.
If you haven't, I suggest reading The Phoenix Project; it is a fantastic read on how a fictional troubled IT department is required to meet a hard deadline, and the process they went through.
Available as an eBook or printed copy here: https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592
I am, of course, saying this without knowing what your work environment is like, or what staffing levels are like, etc, but without doubt, the very first thing I think of when I see people talk about, or tell me that they've got issues keeping up with their workload, is that it's usually because they haven't taken a good look at what they really, genuinely need to do to get business outcomes.
Put another way, do you really need to put a TPS coversheet on every report?
Na verdade, cria-se muito mito em cima de nomenclaturas. O SRE veio da engenharia de software como bem aborda aquele famoso livro do Gene Kin o The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps... . O SRE hoje pela definição de onde se originou (o Google), e atuando dentro do Google propriamente, é o que seria em tese o nome que se dá erroneamente ao (Engenheiro DevOps)...que sabemos ser um nome de mercado...uma vez que na teoria não faz sentido algum.
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O SRE é o cara que compreende a arquitetura dos projetos, de lógica de programação (podendo atuar nas mais diversas linguagens), apesar de ter maioria em python e GO, mas que resolve todo tipo de problema relacionado principalmente a operações. É uma tentativa de mercado de resgatar o MacGyver , que consegue juntar um chiclete e um clips e produzir uma bomba, mas com a intenção de contratar um Chuck Norris . No fim das contas, na prática, é o profissional pau para toda obra. O foda é quando pagam mal por isto.
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Outra coisa também que atrapalha é o EGO e VAIDADE das pessoas em se entitularem tais coisas. Mal sabem da cilada que podem estar se envolvendo. A cilada de enganar o empregador que tem espectativa maior do que aquela que você anuncia, ou a cilada de cair uma porção grande de problemas no seu colo que muitas vezes não há maturidade e experiência para resolve-los. Essas coisas eu vejo com certa frequencia e claro, sempre me disponho a ajudar. Mas é bom dar este toque.
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Sr. Director checking in - required reading IMHO:
Turn the ship around
and
Phoenix Project
You guys need to change how Dev works with you, I'll elaborate once I'm at a computer.
Edit:And I'm back
Where are these apps coming from? What's the driving need for them? Do they serve a business purpose? If so, do they drive revenue or productivity? You guys need to have a chat with the development managers or Director to figure out what their roadmap is for all these apps. They have an idea of their purpose but they're not involving Ops which is a major deficiency when we're looking at adopting a DevOps culture.
When looking at Ops being the constraint, what particular aspect is the constraint? A specific person or process? Isolate the constraint then protect it, if it's a person you're pulling off projects you need to figure out why they're getting pulled off them and remedy that.
As for a technology to look at for a solution, start using Docker. Create standard Docker templates and provide Dev with those as their platform, if they're creating apps for production then you need to provide the standards they deploy to/develop for.
Now go read The Phoenix Project, I'm deadly serious about reading that book as you have a major communication breakdown that is resulting in an insane amount of projects being thrown your way.
/u/HostisHumaniGeneris has a pretty exceptional definition.
The only thing I'd add is my own personal experience. DevOps is a philosophy -- not a team name or a position. For example, a developer can be a "DevOps developer" or a company can be a "DevOps company" as if it's a quality of their performance, but not a purpose. Your actual role shouldn't really include the word "DevOps" because at the end of the day you're still doing IT, or Operations, or Systems, or Development.
The reason being is that for DevOps philosophy to be implemented, all levels of the team need to be on board with the philosophy.
Read "the Phoenix Project" -- for example -- to get some ideas about what DevOps is really about.
One idea is reading more about soft-skills and process stuff, rather than nitty-gritty tech stuff. Books on Agile for example are great. I also listen to a lot of podcasts in that kinda scenario.
Some books that might be good for you:
- https://www.amazon.com/Clean-Agile-Basics-Robert-Martin/dp/0135781868
- https://pragprog.com/book/tpp20/the-pragmatic-programmer-20th-anniversary-edition
- https://www.amazon.com/Soft-Skills-software-developers-manual/dp/1617292397
- https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592
Read this, https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592
Zuckerburg already was thinking about buying unity when they bought oculus. It was mention in the book the history of the future
https://www.amazon.com/History-Future-Facebook-Revolution-Virtual/dp/0062455966
It’s a shame that’s what you think.
I’d recommend you read this book. May help you understand what goes into and how games are made. 80 hour weeks, missed birthdays, no OT pay. It’s a miracle any game gets made.
Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062651234/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_OxCHAbH8FWXPM
Jason has connections all over the gaming industry. He even wrote a book about a few game developments: https://www.amazon.com.br/Blood-Sweat-Pixels-Triumphant-Turbulent/dp/0062651234
He keeps posting on troubled development stories on Kotaku too (the Anthem and BO4 articles, for example). He earned my trust in regards for info in the game industry.
>"Italy is very similar to Greece in terms of climate and terrain (with some important differences), and classical Roman architecture took a lot of cues from Greek styles (again, with important differenes). Point being, they could re-use - if not the models - a lot of the same textures from Odyssey, cutting down on the amount of work they would have to do.
>
>It fits within the same era. AC games seem to usually run in series based on time period; you had the Ezio trilogy which hearkened back in Revelations to the first game; you had ACIII and Black Flag in similar eras (Edward was Connor's grandfather), and those plus AC:Unity, AC:Rogue, and AC:Syndicate are all within about a hundred and fifty years of each other (from 1715 at the start of IV to 1868 for Syndicate). Since they've been working in the ancient period with Odyssey and Origins, if they're going to do another game set in that era, it would make sense to do it immediately afterwards - and I don't think they're stupid enough to never make an AC game set in the Roman Empire."
I agree with your points. But at the same time, if we look at their situation right now....they surely will want a game that will be playable on old and new gen next year. So Montreal has 3 years to release it, right?
They surely will not want a brand new era/assets in a game that will have to release in both systems. In that case, they needed something that could use what they have in Origins/Odyssey. Of course, this would give points to Rome, which was something that even I was believing some time ago.
But then, Jason reports puts a wrench into the situation. And when you think about it...Vikings can fit very well (conquests battles, naval system, mercenaries, huge natural landscapes, etc) and also show a more medieval vibe after the 1 year gap, helping to fight series´s fatigue
And yes, I agree that the Roman EMpire would be fantastic. I was believing on AC: Legion a few months ago (at least we got the tittle in another franchise). Is it trully gone? Now that is another question. It would not be impossible to happen after Vikings. We had Odyssey and Black Flag happen right after 3 and Origins, so it would not be that weird for a prequel after a sequel.
The schedule is interesting if they do follow the current formula:
2013 - Black Flag (Montreal)
2015 - SYndicate (Quebec)
2017 - Origins (Montreal) - 4 years of development
2018 - Odyssey (Quebec) - 3 years of development
2020 - Kingdom (Montreal) - 3 years of development
202? - ??? (Quebec) - ? years of development
Will they skip 2021 and then have 4 years for their next gen title? Or only after 2021 will they skip a year and then having their first new era? That is up in the air for now. I think Ubi would give a lot of time for their next gen title and really nail it.
Look at the replies to your post. It really wasn’t funny.
Do some research. Crunch is real, it happens a lot in the industry. I don’t think NetherRealm has denied it either. Here’s a good book that shares a lot of stories about crunch and how damaging it can be:
Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062651234/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_5nooDbZGYAZP0
Pretty sure the crybabies in this scenario are the people whining they’re not getting their DLC fast enough.
Check out Jason Schreier's Blood Sweat and Pixels
Blood Sweat and Pixels graver også i crunchkulturen hos en lang række udviklere, nærmest som en sidebemærkning. Men indtrykket er mest af alt at computerspilbranchen bare er en ung, kreativ og passioneret branche med helt sindsyge deadlines, hvor det ikke rigtig bliver godtaget at sige stop. Jeg tror det var en af Naughty Dog udviklerne der sagde at han i en måned ikke så sin familie, boede i sin bil og spiste morgenmad og aftensmad på den samme tankstation. Der var bare en forståelse for, at hvis ting ikke blev leveret til tiden kunne udgiveren dræbe projektet fra dag til dag, og så var alt tabt.
Så troede man at crowdfundingrevolutionen endelig ville gøre en ende på problemet, ved at udviklere kunne tage ting i et lidt roligere tempo uden at være afhængige af "Big Brother" til finansiering. Det var så løgn.
You should read his book, Blood Sweat and Pixels, it deep dives into a lot of games developments just like in this article (including Dragon Age Inquisition). It’s an absolutely fascinating, if sometimes depressing, read.
https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Sweat-Pixels-Triumphant-Turbulent/dp/0062651234
Buying him computer hardware might be nice, but there's a lot of other ways to give something related to games and game design.
There's always a great big pound of dice. It's full of dice of assorted numbers of sides, and a game designer remotely interested in tabletop (which should be all of them) can use a healthy supply of dice for making tabletop games. There's always the fun of just rolling dice giant handfuls of dice.
I'm out right now but I'll add the link when I get back home.Here's the link: Pound of diceI'd also look into games he hasn't tried. BoardGameGeek has a lot of board games listed and reviewed that you could get, and of course there's always steam. For board games I'd recommend:
There's also a lot of books on game design you can get him. You may have to check to see if he owns some of these already, but I've found them to be great reads that I can recommend to anyone interested in game design.
A phrase that you might be looking for is "rich get richer", or in mathematical literature, "preferential attachment processes". There's a very accessible pop-sci book about this:
http://www.amazon.com/Linked-Everything-Connected-Else-Means/dp/0452284392
Basic Economics - Thomas Sowell
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age - Duncan Watts
Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means - Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks - Mark Buchanan
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
Sperm Wars: Infidelity, Sexual Conflict, and Other Bedroom Battles - Robin Baker
Motley Crue: The Dirt - Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band - Neil Strauss
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference - Malcolm Gladwell
The Wisdom of Crowds - James Surowiecki
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster - Jon Krakauer
The Climb - Anatoli Boukreev
Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner - Dean Karnazes
For a lighter read on graph theory try Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means. It's a Gee-Wiz kind of book (i.e. light on theory but full of fun facts). And it's likely within your budget.
Are they into learning about this stuff? If not, no amount of training material will make a difference. This sort of thing is what got me hooked:
The Cuckoo's Egg
Takedown
Similarly, Takedown is an interesting novel along the same lines. It's about the search for the legendary social engineer Kevin Mitnick and his arrest. It's non-fiction as well. The one caveat is that the novel is written from an highly biased point of view by a guy with a big ego, so that may turn you off.
Sounds like a condensation of The Phoenix Project
http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Ops-Handbook-Implementing-Practical/dp/0975568612 by my boss Kevin Behr and his co-authors. Also http://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262509 by the same trio. In the latter the opposing factors of planned and unplanned work. Planned work, us in development would think of as stories, epics, etc in a card/wall/board centric app. Unplanned work: tickets in a incident/problem management app. You have to attend both of course, and work to minimize unplanned work. ThePhoenixProject is TheGoal but 30 years later and skewed towards IT (while still in a manufacturing company, with it's own bricks and mortar outlets), and contrasting planned and unplanned work, as I said. VisibleDevOps talks of ITIL, which ties in the "Managing IT operations" you were asking about.
These look great - I'm buying them asap.
Amazon recommends a third book as well: "Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale".
I'm still a young C# developper, around 3 years of C# for websites and APis for small and big companies, but it's not because your predecessors built an in-house framework that this is the right way to build a system. C# is a great language but it shine thanks to the core orientation of productivity delivered by the .NET framework and ASP.MVC.
Of course if your needs are so specifics that you want a custom framework, don't forget that it will become a HR problem. Talented people rarely want to jail themselves to a company and build a specific set of skills that can't be transferred.
But as I said, I'm young. I do think that we are living on the shoulders of giants and that not everything need to be rebuilt. Some of the coolest techs we've seen these past years around containers and micro-services were actually already implemented in the 70's.
That said, I didn't read this book, so I will read it and predictably learn a lot of things. If you didn't already, I would recommend the following books. They aren't C# specific but will help you in the environment you are describing:
A mountain of pattern for common uses cases to improve stability and efficiency of legacy apps.
(https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262509/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1498813798&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=the+phoenix+project)
An inspiring guide on how to work and migrate from waterfall project toward a more predictable project management methodology.
The team I'm on is somewhat unique in our organization and we have been using a modified and always evolving Kanban method.
Our choice to try Kanban came after having read The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim. We really loved the iterative feedback that a system like Kanban can provide.
We started with yarn and sticky notes on a whiteboard until we felt comfortable with the process and then migrated to Kanbanflow. We do individual task time tracking in Toggl.
We had played with bigger solutions targeted for VAR/MSPs but found that they also wanted to be CRM solutions (and a lot of other cruft that we didn't need). Basically, we were wasting our time trying to learn tools instead of processes.
Will we be using these solutions six months from now? Who knows. We are able to shift pretty easily between tools and like to be able to pick what we need. We tend towards simple, useful SaaS offerings that know what they want to provide and do it really well.
Not a tech book exactly but check out the Phoenix Project. It is a fictional story about a IT manager that becomes the Director of IT in a tanking business. It is fictional but VERY informative when it comes to project management, especially if you plans to manage a team. It talks about how to handle problems in the tech world and how to interact with other departments. Very good story.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0988262509/ref=cm_sw_su_dp
realmente, não há exatamente um consenso sobre o que é devops, mas a meu ver é mais um filosofia do que realmente uma função. é um modelo de trabalho que procura quebrar os silos funcionais dentro de uma empresa e trazer uma maior integração entre elas, trazendo maior agilidade e resultados mais rápidos. Tudo isso permeado com bastante automação e melhoria continua sempre focado nos beneficos que isso vai trazer pro negocio. Sei que falando desse jeito parece um conceito bem vago, mas é algo que envolve coisas como:
Esse link aqui pode te dar uma boa introdução no assunto: https://theagileadmin.com/what-is-devops/
Além disso, te recomendo fortemente que leia um livro chamado The Phoenix Project, que conta a historia de uma empresa fabricante de auto-peças que precisava ganhar agilidade para enfrentar a concorrencia ou estariam fadados a fechar as portas.
https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592
I agree with you, in a way.
In my experience an entire IT team may be 50-60% effective but it's because of a single person doing 100% their own capacity. There seem to be alot of people who slack off while their colleagues pick up the slack. This isn't always laziness. It could be that they don't have the proper skill sets, may have apprehension in working with some technologies, or aren't familiar with the entire environment enough to do things themselves. This is sort of like the scenario presented in the phoenix project
Work doesn't get done because of the single person working at capacity and other people "blocked" on that person. This gives the illusion of a very busy IT team and lack of staff but in reality management just needs to address the underlying issues... again, kind of like in "the phoenix project" :)
QBQ. The Question Behind the Question
The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
Rework
Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In
Gemba Kaizen: A Commonsense, Low-Cost Approach to Management
Time Management for System Administrators
By its very nature, DevOps roles are typically not "junior", and you'll have to have earned your mid-level stripes in systems/operations/cloud engineering to graduate on into DevOps.
Read [0] "The Phoenix Project" and [1] "Leading the Transformation" for an introduction to what DevOps theory/philosophy is all about. It's really worth taking the time to study these books, even if what is in them may not be something you're going to apply at your current job.
Get an [2] AWS certification. As a difficult and rare exam, companies looking view those who hold the DevOps Engineer certification in high esteem.
[0] http://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Leading-Transformation-Applying-DevOps-Principles/dp/1942788010
[2] https://cloudacademy.com/learning-paths/devops-engineer-professional-certification-AWS-13/
Doesn't matter the year, The Phoenix Project is a must.
I'm a software developer with about 5 years of experience , and I used to have the same sorts of problems where I would over-commit to getting work done and under-deliver. To summarize, I changed to where I only commit to tasks that will take 1-2 days or less at a time, and I make it very very public what I'm working on in order to manage both my and my team's expectations. Here are the gritty details (ymmv of course):
Side note: in general I limit my work in progress (WIP limit) to one large task and one small task. If there are production issues or something I break my WIP limit by 1 and take on a third task (it has to be an emergency like the site is down and we are losing money), and I make sure that whatever caused the WIP limit to break gets sufficient attention so that it doesn't happen again (usually in the form of a blameless postmortem ) . If someone asks me to work on something that will break the WIP limit by more than one, then I lead them to negotiate with the person who asked me to break it in the first place, because there is not way one person can work on two emergencies at the same time.
Here's some books I've read that lead me to work like this
As you may notice, the latter 3 books are mostly about how to quickly and reliably ship software. Developer workflow is a big part of getting that to happen, and many people have some of the same problems we do.
I could go on like this for hours because I fucking love kanban. Feel free to PM me if you want to chat about your specific problems. There is figuratively nothing that I would rather talk to internet strangers about.
As an Enterprise Architect, i believe you would need to have a great understanding of the nature of your business.. Around asset depreciation (in effect does it make sense for you to close down your datacenter?), how outsourcing contracts affect your P&L etc. Also around what the outlook of the business is - is your business looking at net new business models or possible adjacent markets? If no, then a cloud migration/transformation probably doesn't make alot of sense (also, if the answer to that question is no - do you think your organisation will survive in the next 5 years?).
Reason being is a cloud migration/transformation will never be cheaper than running things on-prem/outsourced, not unless your workload was purpose-built for the cloud - from an architectural PoV, this is what the industry calls "cloud-native".
Now, if you're still with me - then that means that you have good reasons for moving to the cloud. I would advise to start small - never, ever do a big-bang. Approach this like you would a scientific experiment. Form a hypothesis, have a controlled group and variable group, then evaluate, learn, and adopt. If you're wrong, pivot, then try something else. If you're right, build on top of that then scale.
You will probably realise that doing things this way sound alot like Agile - and they are similar. You might also feel that existing tooling and your organisational structure doesn't allow for that kind of work - as you will optimize for speed and getting quick feedback from your stakeholders (or customers). This is the fundamental problem of cloud adoption within enterprises - enabling a large organisation to work in this way, while making sure that you're not breaking any laws or regulation. Organisations who fail at this simply move their costs to the public cloud provider, then complain that it's too expensive without achieving real value, then decide to move back on prem (costing millions again).
This will require : a) Organisational change - grouping people not by function, but by the value they deliver towards a company goal or outcome and b) Cultural change - a culture that embraces change, and the failure that comes with it. And not resting on your laurels once you achieve success; and lastly, c) Architectural changes - towards decoupling, independence, and resilience.
There's alot of content out there (including the ones you mentioned) that will help out for C - Architectural changes, but not much for the first two.. It is, arguably the easiest part of the three, unfortunately.
Oh, and one more thing - there's this thing called DevOps as well - not the tools surrounding it, but rather the discipline and culture that comes along with it. I'd recommend you to read https://www.amazon.com.au/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592 before anything else.
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DevOps is broad - very board. Some say it's not even a "thing".
Your request is quite broad.
I'll do my best, and feel free to ping back any specific questions as all DevOps requirements are conditional based on your working context.
Considering your background, and your current approach to DevOps, I'd suggest reading up on DevOps culture, generic tooling (in various classes), amongst various other topics (apologies for the ambiguity here, but there is too much without more specific context).
DevOps Tooling Classes:
(Naming a minuscule fraction of the available tooling.)
Ask yourself these questions to help you with your Google'ing:
If I had to sum it all up, and give you the best vectors to approach this:
Think of DevOps as being able to deliver a business requirement using reliable and reproducible techniques:
As I mentioned before, DevOps is very broad.
Read https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592
Ping back for help! That's what DevOps is all about!
Software engineering is different than many other things. It takes a lot more than just wanting. It also can't be accomplished with just money.
I can't tell you how big of a role that leadership and vision play in the equation.
But it is then the process. That is where Google has really been a leader. Google basically invented the entire SRE/DevOps space.
Wrote the canonical book on the subject. Well the latest one.
To me it is The Goal and then Phoenix Project and then you finish with the Google SRE book.
You read in that order. If a software engineer it will change your perspective if not yet read. Google just read them a lot earlier than others.
Here is a link to the books I am talking about if do not work in the field
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel)
https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592
https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/introduction/
Here's your homework:
Then start looking into individual technologies. Docker, Drone, Kubernetes can work together on the same stack, for example. Start there, then figure out what's interchangeable.
You'll need to establish awareness of the business needs and full stack context before DevOps will make proper sense.
The Phoenix Project (https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592)
Whilst it's not primarily about security, it does play a major role in the story.
It's important as a security professional to see where the industry is headed, and how security can adapt.
I found it a great read from a security perspective.
The Phoenix Project
https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592
Phoenix Project
HIM is the core of all badness in healthcare. I assume you know this but the fact that it's a total disaster in general is responsible for my income. Have you read the Phoenix project?. To me that's a must read for anyone in IT management. It literally changed how I saw things. You can read it in a day. Trello for Kanban, with slack integration can be amazing.
When I interview I talk about the 4 types of work and how they handle flow. I'm a consultant so I need to understand what sort of a disaster I'm getting into. You need that info to especially since you're early in the year and course is somewhat laid in.
For interview questions I'd be prepared to answer MU, HIPAA (Cfr 164), HITECH (13410d). Budgeting, team management and find out if you gel with the CIO. Most of them aren't morons but some are simply incompetent.
I wish you the best!
Ok! Here’re a few:
http://www.gallup.com/press/176069/first-break-rules-world-greatest-managers-differently.aspx
https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Leadership-Steps-Transforming-Performance/dp/0060835915
http://www.jamesshore.com/Agile-Book/
https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592
Your situation is remarkably similar to The Phoenix Project (http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0988262592). I encourage you to check it out.
It sounds like your company doesn't believe its success is dependent upon a well-managed IT infrastructure. Which business goals are jeopardized by this behavior? How can you effectively communicate that 1) without properly planning capacity the IT team might as well be a gulag, and 2) without controlling what work is released to IT, it is destined to be perceived as a cost center instead of contributing to the company's value stream?
...have you ever been able to say no to a business/development proposal that got dumped on your team?
At the very least, the book might provide some consolation that your IT pains are not unique :]
there‘s a lot of possible outcomes. one of them would be our extinction, yes. not because AGI is evil, but it may be misaligned with or goals.
check life 3.0 by max tegmark:
https://www.amazon.com/Life-3-0-Being-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/1101946598
and the youtube channel by robert miles:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLB7AzTwc6VFZrBsO2ucBMg
It's on my reading list, but I've heard good things about https://www.amazon.com/Life-3-0-Being-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/1101946598. It's a non-fiction book that looks at the effects AI will have on the world. I'm also writing about an AI, and I hope this book helps my understanding as well.
Beyond that and the suggestions I've seen below, Westworld is another show with AI in it to check out.
Maybe something like this
http://www.amazon.com/Dreaming-Code-Programmers-Transcendent-Software/dp/1400082471
The DevOps Handbook, Team Geek and Debugging Teams come to mind.
I don't think there is something specifically for "devops managers" (what is that even?). General leadership books would work for you as a manager I suppose. Just keep the principles of DevOps in mind when you do manage away.
The Book, Debugging Teams is fairly short and creates some super great, easy to implement, powerful skills for any manager or team.
Nice list! I'd add Debugging Teams to that list too. I love Five Dysfunctions and Manager's path
Not sure if this is what you're looking for: http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/dp/1590597141
Checkout founders at work
http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/dp/1590597141
Here are all the books with amazon links, Alphabetical order :)
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Hey there!
UX Designer/Researcher here. I came from a background in Psychology and Neuroscience research before UX Design. Personally I used the UCSD Extension for a certificate in UX Design. I really appreciated the course work and in conjunction with the Coursera Interaction Design felt like I was given plenty of exposure while also having flexibility to work.
From my experience in the industry, I would look into what area you are interested in. UX careers can involve programming and development, but I use absolutely no coding at my current position (at others I have though). The biggest selling point to an employer is showing an understanding of the process: wireframes, flow charts, user studies, iteration (agile/scrum/waterfall), and design understanding. I have worked on multiple billion dollar webpages and can say the process is nearly identical when scaled down.
If you are interested in some resources to start on your own I would recommend Simon Sinek's Start with Why for understanding how to look at design solutions.
Don Norman has many great books, including The Design of Everyday Things.
Some actual books to look at and learn on your own are A Project Guide to UX Design, Lean UX, and The UX Book. I highly recommend the last one I find it very thorough and digestible and for ~60 bucks is a reasonable textbook.
Lastly, once you have a grasp of UX as a concept I would get familiar with the Adobe Suite, Axure or InVision, and any others from career sites that you might not know about (I really like [Sketch]() as a cheap option ~$99).
Best of luck, feel free to ping me with questions
Yes.
Start with #2.
Absolutely! Here's a short list of non-magic books that I commonly see recommended to magicians.
Understanding Comics - Scott McCloud
Purple Cow - Seth Godin
Delft Design Guide - multiple authors
An Acrobat of the Heart - Stephen Wangh (shouts out to u/mustardandpancakes for the recommendation)
In Pursuit of Elegance - Guy Kawasaki
The Backstage Handbook - Paul Carter, illustrated by George Chiang
Verbal Judo - George Thompson and Jerry Jenkins
Be Our Guest - Ted Kinni and The Disney Institute
Start With Why - Simon Sinek
Lots of common themes even on such a short list. What would you add to the list? What would you take away?
He also has a book on the subject which might be of help to you: http://www.amazon.com/Start-Why-Leaders-Inspire-Everyone/dp/1591846447
I'm reading it at the moment and so far so good, but the bulk of the idea is covered in the Ted talk.
I'm reading Elon Musk's biography right now and think it might be helpful if you're talking about career success. The dude seems like a jerk but has an incredible work ethic and drive to succeed.
You can say pretty much the same exact thing about Augustus' biography.
Outliers really helped me a lot, because it made me realize talent wasn't nearly important as skill/effort. You put in the time and effort and you will develop your skills.
If you're an introvert like me these books helped me "fake it till I make it" or just want to be more socially capable: Charisma Myth, anything by Leil Lowndes, Make People Like You in 90 Seconds. Not a book but the Ted Talk about body language by Amy Cuddy
A book on leadership I always hear good things about but haven't read yet is Start With Why.
There are already some great ones posted so I'll just go with a couple more... non traditional ones that are surprisingly helpful.
Purple Cow
Start With Why
Have you tried the DevOps Handbook?
The Devops Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1942788002/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_WMs4ybAXM9TPX
This one.
https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002/ref=pd_sbs_14_img_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;psc=1&amp;refRID=AACV133PGSYZ0D84739R
I highly recommend The DevOps Handbook; I'm in the midst of reading it now, if you appreciated The Phoenix Project then this comes across super practical and to the point.
https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002
https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002
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Explained best in this book - The DevOps Handbook.
There is a wonderful book about process improvement from about 35 years ago called The Goal by Eli Goldwater that is written as a novel. Wonderful book - terrible novel: The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement https://www.amazon.com/dp/0884271951/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_AS.vDb6F2QH3T
And The Phoenix Project - on DevOps is an homage to The Goal and is also a novel: The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win https://www.amazon.com/dp/1942788290/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_9Y.vDb2981BYS
Also an amazing book and a terrible novel. Both of these are great examples of the power of different learning styles. The novel format accommodates Socratic Learning (questioning) and is just a terrific way to teach what would otherwise be very dry subjects. Humans are wired for storytelling and these books are exemplars of that.
Some of these are directly related to programming and some are not but are additional reading that touch on skills that most every programmer should have some concept or idea of.
I've read all of these at some point throughout my career and can attest to their usefulness. Here's my personal list:
Scuse my ignorance... What does OM mean? 😁 But yes, we're trying to optimise for overall flow of customer value. The other metrics account for "de-risk deployments by doing it a lot", "don't break production" and "if you do fix it quickly". These are not of our own design by the way... Completely plagiarised from https://www.amazon.co.uk/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Technology-Organizations/dp/1942788339
The overhead for measuring feature lead time is minimal thankfully. I put a label such 'value-marker-1' against the first and last stories in a Jira epic. A new valuable thing inside an epic just means I increment the number on the labels I use. Also means you can have measure multiple valuable things in an epic with overlapping timelines. My cronjob gathers this up daily along with a bunch of other metric information. I owe a detailed blog post to https://medium.com/onzo-tech by the end of March.
We're seeing a healthy tension across the route numbers and it looks hard to game one without sacrificing elsewhere. I am measuring deployment leadtime too but haven't set a target there as I can see it leading to bad behaviour. One thing I am currently wary of is the short term temptation to reduce technical quality in return for lower leadtime. It would eventually manifest in higher change failure rate and increasing lead times
This game looks awesome! Truly, truly. Be sure to post about it in /r/IndieGaming.
Spend the time on it; read the chapter in Blood, Sweat, & Pixels about Stardew Valley, then get the game right.
Cheers and best to ya.
You can download the Etherium Wallet here where you can at least start taking a look at some dev tools. This was also posted on /r/ethereum yesterday and it mentions Truffle which seems like a pretty great resource. Learning JavaScript will be helpful. Oh, and I just remembered there's a humble bundle happening right now that includes a book on Solidity and Ethereum (although you can get just that book as a Kindle version for ten bucks on Amazon). I haven't personally started doing anything with Solidity though, so I can't vouch for how great these resources are. Just passing along the information that I've seen in the last couple days.
It's absolutely not in that category.
The language isn't obfuscated at all. This is an incredibly new technology, so everything is geared towards those who can contribute to the project. Much of the prerequisite knowledge is implied.
There is countless articles and videos that attempt to explain the platform though. If you are having trouble understanding what these terms mean, you can easily purchase a
book like this.
My ELI5 for smart-contracts would simply be, "You rent your bike to a friend. Using a smart-contract their payment is automatically enforced every week. The smart-contact could also respond to non-payment in a number of ways, such as automatically placing the bike on a rental marketplace".
Whether Etherium succeeds or not, some variation of smart-contracts are likely to be used by major institutions in the distant future.
Read the Phoenix Project this week. Seriously. It's a great parable for fixing your stuff. https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business-ebook/dp/B078Y98RG8
Introducing Solidity and Ethereum is alright. For now I would just look into the documentation of Solidity, Truffle, geth, Web3 etc. Mastering Ethereum looks super promising, as it's written by Gavin Wood (co-founder of Ethereum, made Solidity) as well as Andreas Antonopoulos (wrote Mastering Bitcoin). It's supposed to come out later this year.
The problem is that these tools change so fast that books might be outdated by the time you read or get them. It doesn't help that this is such a new field. Even the documentation sometimes isn't up to date.
I've read Introducing Ethereum and Solidity and it pretty good.
I'm working on a tutorial on how to create a DApp using React and Solidity that I will post on my blog. If you are interested, you can subscribe to get an email when I publish it.
You're going to find yourself in a position where you'll need to communicate external dependencies to your team, and also where you'll need to communicate the work you do outward. Focus on how you can deliver these messages in the most effective manner so that everyone hears them.
Develop a culture of rigor. If you want a product that's stable, secure, performant, and maintainable, you should state that very clearly, and bring all your internal discussion back to those tenets. If you don't have them already, invest in testing, real-world monitoring and error reporting, and code review.
Code review is the worst place to make architectural decisions. It's expensive and difficult to make changes when you catch them at this stage. If you're catching architectural issues at code review, it means you don't have enough process up front to design the system/code correctly.
It's a powerful thing to say "I don't know" or "I was wrong". You'll develop a trust with your team that they can depend on you to be searching for the right answer, even when you don't know.
Have a weekly "dev team meeting". Having a forum every week where you can talk about the tactical approach to the project can be really helpful. As the name suggests, keep it to just the dev team, and possibly the manager if they are extremely technical and directly involved in helping the team execute on the project.
Finally, I can't recommend this book highly enough. It's a quick read, and you'll come back to it many times. https://www.amazon.com/Debugging-Teams-Productivity-through-Collaboration/dp/1491932058
In general every path is different, so take all advice with skepticism. Study of entrepreneurship has shown that reality differs from traditional teaching. For example, business plans tend to be used after the fact for improvement rather than seriously up front. This is covered well on Effectuation. The E-Myth books cover important basics, though most of those books say the same things and it does not always apply. Paul Orfalea's Copy This is pragmatic and inspirational. An old but still good book with various lessons about doing business is Startup by Jerry Kaplan. The book Founders at Work has lots of real stories that drive home how much work startups are and how different and in a way alienating the work can be, as starting something is not like having a job.
For ideas and inspiration in general the Change This site can be a good source. Good luck!
I've recently been reading this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/dp/1590597141
which is full of anecodtes about the early days of Adobe to Yahoo (including reddit favourites like Viaweb and Fog Creek). It's interesting reading (better than tryint to find another nuggest of wisdom in the latest AJAX book :) )
If you're doing a technology startup especially, a couple of books from the YC guys: Hackers and Painters and Founders At Work.
I'll give you two book tips:
I don't know if you can order these books. Both are available as EPUB as well if you use a normal e-reader or laptop.
Start With Why [Simon Sinek]
48 Laws of Power [Robert Greene] (33 Strategies of War, Art of Seduction)
The 50th Law [Curtis James Jackson]
Tipping Point:How Little Things Can Make a Difference and Outliers: The story of Succes [Malcolm Gladwell]
The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy [Ryan Holiday] (stoicism)
[Tim Ferris] (actually haven't read any of his books, but seems to know a way to use social media, podcast, youtube)
Get an understanding to finance, economics, marketing, investing [Graham, Buffet], philosophy [Jordan Peterson]
I like to think us/you/business is about personal development, consciousness, observing recognizable patterns in human behavior and historical significance. It's an understanding of vast areas of subjects that connect and intertwine then returns back to the first book you’ve read (Start with Why) and learn what you've read past to present. Business is spectacular, so is golf.
To Add:
Irrationally Predictable:The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions - [Dan Ariely] (marketing)
The Hard Things About Hard Things - [Ben Horowitz] (business management)
Black Privilege: Opportunity Comes to Those Who Create It - [Charlamagne Tha God] (motivation)
The Lean Startup: Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses - [Eric Ries]
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, How to Build the Future - [Peter Theil]
Selecting business ventures based off of market — or lack thereof — is not the best motivation.
I would advise you read this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Start-Why-Leaders-Inspire-Everyone/dp/1591846447
> WHO matters most, then WHY, then HOW, then WHAT, then WHEN. Hire the right people with the right motives who follow a great plan and what you do and when you do it should work out on it’s own. x 2
This is kind of wrong. It should be Why > what > how > the rest.
You first have a purpose. Then you have a product. Then you have how you did it.
You can find more info here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp0HIF3SfI4
and here: https://www.amazon.com/Start-Why-Leaders-Inspire-Everyone/dp/1591846447
Hi! Sorry for the delay, I wanted to answer this correctly (and I'm happy to discuss it further).
> If anyone else than Symfony created a HTTP client, I would argue you wouldn't have answered with the same level of questioning.
Agreed.
> it means Symfony has a reach and people expect high quality packages coming from it.
Yes high quality is a criteria, but it's not the one thing. I think the key here is the impact: Symfony has a lot of weight in the community.
> But it's also a shame, because it tends to demotivate people trying to innovate. When everyone is asking you to justify every single action you do, you tend to stop because you're tired, especially if you do it for free.
Understood, sorry about that. I'll try to be careful about the way I say things.
The thing is that it's hard discussing some topics, and this is something I see often: either you say nothing (and avoid any risk to hurt or displease anyone, or even look like a fool), either you speak, but you need to find the right words and formulate it in a constructive way.
I want to speak about this topic because I care. And because most developers I am discussing with are unhappy as well (but none of them is saying much). I find it disheartening to see this (given how Symfony is important and used, and how many people work on it - including for free as you said), and my goal is to share this in the hopes that things change somehow. I am not looking to dismiss anyone's work.
Now let's try to discuss the actual topic:
I agree that it isn't just about Guzzle vs Symfony's new component, or even PSR-18 (which is why I don't think it's worth discussing specifically about this). A few facts:
Now I hope I portrayed these as facts (and I may have some of them wrong). I completely understand that many of these things happened because of good technical reasons.
But if you look at it from what "it looks like": Symfony seems to be aiming to be a closed ecosystem. Symfony used to be the open framework, built upon reusable components and compatible with any PHP library out there. Now it feels like things are changing (note I am talking about a feeling, it may actually not be the case but that's what some people feel). For example some people believe that the next step for Symfony is to reimplement Monolog as a component (and possibly ditch PSR-3), and the next step would be Doctrine. Same goes for API Platform. Personally I think it's possible that this may happen.
And things can change, it's fine, but here it seems like it's a whole change of identity. And I think that's why some people feel uncomfortable, and that's why as well it's so hard to voice (because it's intangible).
Lately I've been reading Start with why and it explains it very well. Nobody complains about Laravel releasing stuff in a closed ecosystem: that's what Laravel is about. It's part of its identity. Symfony's identity has (from my perception) always been different: more open, more about the community, etc. Maybe it's time to redefine clearly the Symfony identify (and explain that it's changing)? Maybe it's just a communication issue? I don't think it's a technical issue in any case.
Anyway as you can see it's not easy putting words on all of this. But to reiterate: I'm talking about how some people feel (to give concrete number it's between 5 to 10 people). And I feel like it's worth talking about it because I care about the Symfony and the PHP community. I hope that helps!
Love the downvotes without comments... the assertion above is taken almost verbatum from a talk I went to where Gene Kim was presenting a couple of years ago.
This is the Holy Bible of DevOps. Well, it's the Old Testament. The New Testament is https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002
I'd second all these and add
Read this immediately.
https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002
Haha guess I saw the "tipsy" and checked out after that! My focus is functional programming, so most of my recommendations are around that.
LambdaCast and The REPL are good and worth listening through (full disclosure I was on the REPL).
Other casts that I cherry-pick through:
Some good books:
You should also check out hillelogram and his talks/podcasts/writing on TLA+ if you're not familiar.
Do you have any good recommendations?
https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592/
Very good read, also recommend the follow up DevOps Handbook:
https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002/
It seems that you want to cover DevOps to some degree. I'd look at the DevOps handbook https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002/ref=sr_1_10?keywords=DevSecOps+Handbook&qid=1554391709&s=gateway&sr=8-10
, along with covering the technologies that @wsppan touched on.
The DevOps Handbook has some good stuff on these topics, in addition to what others here have said.
https://smile.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002/ref=sr_1_1
You should definitely read this book: The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win.
It's very fun to read and talks about a business transformation with DevOps / Agile.
The questions you ask are answered in the book.
&#x200B;
Cheers, Johan
They should have read "The Phoenix project" book
https://www.amazon.ca/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/1942788290?th=1&amp;psc=1&amp;source=googleshopping&amp;locale=en-CA&amp;tag=googcana-20&amp;ref=pd_sl_36pzhuhqz5_e
Accelerate (book)
Planning methology
The 12 Factor App
Tooling: Go google for Continuous Delivery.
AWS Devops cert is not as useful as practical system design experience. Try other clouds as well, they are pretty good
> How do you go about debugging this situation
A combination of monitoring dashboards (new relic, datadog, rollbar etc.) and looking at the codebase and recent releases to see what may be the problem, the solution is usually either a restart/rollback/fix-forward
> Are there system wide graphs that are viewed first before narrowing down to specific component or microservice?
Yes, these are critical. If you don't have monitoring in production, you're flying blind.
> what specific metrics would you evaluate, and how would you use those to go down to the component that has problem?
A combination of service availability (is service up? receiving requests?) and what I call "functional correctness" (is service doing what we expect? is the DB being filled with garbage data?)
> Is there an article or video talk that you can provide for me to dig deeper?
I suggest you start with this: https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Technology-Organizations/dp/1942788339
And like others have mentioned, do some google searches on "Software/Site Reliability Engineering"
Edit: one thing I forgot to mention, we are alerted to problems automatically, and this automation is critical, you need to set up your monitoring dashboards to alert when you start deviating from your baseline, like another comment said, if customers complaining is what's alerting you to a problem, then that's a monitoring and alerting gap that needs to be fixed!
Edit2: this alerting can happen through phone calls, slack messages, emails, etc.
TL;DR Google "Cost of Delay", Puppet's 2016 State of DevOps Report page 43 for rework calculations, and compare &#37;C/A improvement to increased &#37;Innovation (&#37;I).
This has been a major
challengeopportunity for us. I would start by aligning the conversation to Agile Principle #1's three main tenants: Customer Satisfaction, Valuable Software, and Early and Continuous Delivery. If you are in a large (and old) IT organization such as mine, these tenants are loosely held to, barely understood, or simply dismissed. However, in order to measure the success of a digital transformation, these three things must be measured. For the sake of our VSM effort's MVP, we've focused on measuring Early and Continuous Delivery. (You can also discuss this in the context of the 3-ways of DevOps. Early and Continuous relates to the first way. Customer Satisfaction and Valuable Software are feedback loops of the second way. And getting us there is the third way.)For our first pass at measuring Early and Continuous Delivery, we discussed how we could reduce total cost of change by reducing overall lead time (LT). A simple calc is team member count * hourly rate ($/hr) * 6 hrs/day * overall LT in days. You can get specific and do that calculation per value stream process block and add it up, or keep it high level and you'll be in the ballpark - off by 10-15&#37; at the most. If you're working in hours, then you can adjust the formula by dropping the "6 hrs/day" part. (If you're working in minutes, you should just make the case for purchasing Google Nap Pods or something. =))
The problem with relating overall LT reduction to a cost of change reduction is it's not completely accurate unless the lead time and process time (PT) are the same. So LT = PT + QT. And unless we propose that queue time (QT) is spent doing nothing related to other value-add work (which would be tough to argue), then really the PT is the total cost of change. (I'd imagine we'd both agree that context switching has some non-value-add overhead, but how much? Maybe 10&#37;?)
What we've found is that if we're talking about reducing overall LT the best measurement to catalyze the improvement conversation is to consider Cost of Delay (also check out here and here). You can show that by reducing overall lead time, we can capture the first-mover advantage, thus reducing or eliminating Cost of Delay. We are in a competitive capitalistic market after all. Our business measurements are relatively immature, so we used hypothetical numbers to demonstrate this. Obviously real numbers would be more impactful.
Next, consider &#37;C/A. Rework (aka waste work) is potentially one of the biggest wastes of IT budget (and more importantly a development team's time) that a VSM can capture - a low &#37;C/A is most certainly creating rework. Check out page 43 of Puppet's 2016 State of DevOps Report as it provides a simple calculation for rework cost. It may also be important for the group creating the VSM to perform RCA on a low &#37;C/A process block as this may actually be the principle constraint of flow.
Moreover, a &#37;C/A problem in Production has a direct impact on Customer Satisfaction. Framing improvement work with a risk-based mindset will inform you that solving a low &#37;C/A problem in the Prod process block has a measurable impact on Customer Satisfaction. (Two before and after short surveys to your customers, internal or external, should show a diff in Customer Satisfaction if the &#37;C/A in the Prod process block is improved.)
The last point is more of a qualitative measurement, and that is around &#37;Time for Innovation (&#37;I). I hope your organization doesn't devalue development teams as I have seen from time to time, but remember, development teams contain some of the most creative and capable women and men in the entire company. It's important that they move away from doing work a machine can do through automation and focus on innovative (aka creative) work. If you research HP's printer firmware transformation, you'll see that they related &#37;C/A work (warranty) to &#37;I. It makes sense that if the team is not doing rework, then they have time to focus on innovation. While this doesn't directly relate to Agile Principle #1, it will likely map to Customer Satisfaction and/or Valuable Software, since &#37;I time can be spent doing A/B testing, spiking new and relevant technology, or simply interacting with customers directly thus gaining empathy for their jobs to be done.
I also highly recommend Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps. The first part gets into some numbers and is essentially targeting middle management and up. It will give you some scientific foundations for some of these improvement conversations.
The business justification of VSM and improvement work is a big subject, and I'm still learning. Remember that finance is as much art as it is science. I hope this gives you some ideas!
That's a weird one.
I've seen this version recommended; it doesn't have a Kindle version that I know of: https://www.amazon.com/Game-Over-Press-Start-Continue/dp/0966961706/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1481671222&amp;sr=1-3&amp;keywords=Game+over
I have the Kindle edition of this version that is still in print: https://www.amazon.com/Game-Over-Nintendo-Conquered-World-ebook/dp/B0060AY98I/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1481671157&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=game+over+how+nintendo+conquered+the+world.
I'm not sure how similar the content is between the two. The version out of print was published in 1999 and has chapters added by a different author. I suspect it is an updated edition of the version that is still in print.
Go read this book... it covers their business strategy very well including their approach to hardware. Yamauchi was a notorious hard ass about making the best use of inexpensive materials.
Game over: How Nintendo Conquered the World
I can't find a clear link with quotes at the moment though.
Thanks for your insight and wisdom, that is really what makes reddit great and internet forums in general. Someone like me being able to learn and discuss with someone like you. And hopefully the other way too, so that we all are enriched and the community benefits.
Kevin was around back in those years, with his nose to scene, but I wasn't. Do you feel there was anything good that came out of all that sega experimentation, even if it didn't directly benefit sega? Maybe it helped other companies, other tech in the industry, or just certain people who got good ideas or knowledge off of sega's mistakes? Was there anything positive that came of it in anyway?
I used to work at IBM, I was told to read some books, http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Magic-Politics-Personal-Computer/dp/0816013918 , and game over, http://www.amazon.com/Game-Over-Nintendo-Conquered-World-ebook/dp/B0060AY98I/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1426550681&amp;sr=1-7&amp;keywords=game+over and many other books, to learn the history of companies from various perspectives, I always like to read and learn more, can reco any books on sega history?
Losing the money badly, do you think if they had say, a 2 billion dollar cushion like Oculus supposedly does today, to just test all kinds of hardwares, softwares, just burn through zuckers money at free abandon kinda, could they have kept squandering it to a point where they began to make money? If so, speculating of course, how much money do you think Sega should have needed back then to turn it around? Do you think that 2 billion oculus has today, can keep them competitive to the likes of steam, msft, apple, google, etc, is 2 billion all that much against such competition? Carmack had strongly suggested he wanted minecraft for oculus, well now MSFT bought that IP, steam has Half Life 3d more than likely, so just from a computer historian point of view, I am interested in learning all this history, even as it is happening, and peoples view points on it.
I never bought any of the systems you mentioned, the dreamcast was the only one that interested me. What do you think sega could have done to not get developers to hate them, and again your speculation is useful, because maybe the ideas you have could be used by people/companies today, to not make those mistakes again. Could sega have been more supportive of developers? I will not name names, but I would like you to know some general stories I am hearing right now, about various solutions of many things. The developers have hardware in their hands, some of these KEY AAA developer types. And they see problems in various softwares, so they want to fix these problems, well one company has closed source the softwares, and wont share the code, so the developers had to go through this one key programmer that is the code master at the company to suggest changes, (lets call him carmack, but that is just a placeholder name, in no way am I saying it is oculus or carmack in this thought experiment) here is the problem though today, this carmack code master decided he wanted to get paid a higher salary for all the slave code work that was being heaped upon him by all these new issues, and he went to his bosses, give me raise! They are saying FU, we can get a billion coders from india and china to replace you for pennies on the dollar!! So what I am hearing is he is getting mad, and he is one of these code masters that believe in job security, so he didn't document code very well, in fact he may have done lots of tricks in his code to even make his job more secure, I understand the code masters reasons for doing things, I understand the companies reasons for doing things (closed source wise), I understand the developers frustrations that they can't make progress because of these things, but the rest of us, the consumers, are all being hurt by this apex of scenarios. What is the solution from the macro scale, to best benefit the most number of people?
As to reputation, I agree it is very important, people want to feel they are being treated somewhat with freedom, respect, dignity, decency, like a human being and a gentleman. They dont like to feel they are being dictated to by a tyrant, controlled, lied to, backstabbed, used, threatened. Kevin has tried to advise time and time again to certain companies NOT to make the mistakes of the past, the mistakes of previous cycles of VR, the mistakes of a Sega, and he sees them being made again, and so few will listen at sage advice like his, and yours, to consider the past, learn from it, or be doomed to fail from repeating it. I have tried my best to impart to many companies, and even certain people in those companies, how IMPORTANT it is to listen at people like you, people like Kevin, for just reputation affects alone, and they seem to not wish to do so.
I have often said, what does it gain a Padawan Palmer to own the whole neuromancer metaverse, if you snowcrash your soul? I guess the big takeaway, if people don't like your reputation, they will just stop working with you, and that could hurt the whole industry, where we could instead have bridges built and cooperation that does well for the whole industry to benefit us all. Thanks for your time, I appreciate it greatly.
There's a really excellent book called Blood, Sweat, and Pixels that talks about development on a bunch of different games. If you don't know a lot about game development, it's a very eye-opening read. It's kind of amazing that anything ever gets released at all.
I'm in the same position as you, but I've added these to my reading list:
• The Internet of Money: A collection of talks by Andreas M. Antonopoulos, by Andreas M. Antonopoulos
• Some Blockchain Reading looks like a good reading list, mostly whitepapers
• Introducing Ethereum and Solidity: Foundations of Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Programming for Beginners, by Chris Dannen
For the lazy:
Introducing Ethereum and Solidity: Foundations of Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Programming for Beginners by Chris Dannen http://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XQFYL2M/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_udp_api_zY8.yb1RR3MYB
For Video courses, try: https://www.udemy.com/courses/search/?q=solidity&amp;src=ukw
Good intro book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XQFYL2M/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1
Then watch out for the Andreas Antonopoulos' Ethereum book coming out later this year.
It leaves a sour taste in my mouth as well.. It may have happened too.. may have to read a book to find out. or maybe not... Ugh.. I mean it says.. it's detailed in that book. dunno though.
Just finished a great book (The History of the Future) about history of Oculus (Palmer Lucky).
I thought it was worth a read and gave good insight into the founding of company and history between Oculus/Valve/ID Software and others in the early early days of VR.
https://www.amazon.com/History-Future-Facebook-Revolution-Virtual/dp/0062455966
No, he was forced out. The details are pretty interesting — someone wrote a book about it (among other things).
I was just joking about making him moderator though.
It boils down to the fact that game studios, especially the ones that are owned by larger parent companies, are under pressure to hit deadlines. Game development is a business, and studios have financial goals to hit to justify investments in what they're doing. Most video games are sold on marketing and hype anyway, and final builds are usually delivered for distribution well in advance in release day. Generally teams expect to have day-1 patches to fix those bugs, but in many case then can't all be addressed day one. In those cases they triage the largest bugs, and fix smaller ones in later patches.
[Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made]
(https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Sweat-Pixels-Triumphant-Turbulent/dp/0062651234) is a pretty great read, and give some interesting insight into what it takes to get a game out the door.
Adding on to this, Jason Scherier's book, "Blood, Sweat and Pixels" expands on and includes many more of these stories.
Blood, Sweat, and Pixels! I've heard great things about this book from a friend of mine - a good behind the scenes look at how some games are made (or sometimes fail).
>Fine here's some math, Hellblade took 10 million to make and has only sold roughly 1 million copies, so the game sold at $30 would have made 30 million minus the 10 million and minus roughly 10-15% cut that Sony, Microsoft and Steam take from each sale. So that's close to a 20 million dollar profit, nothing crazy and nothing that would have Microsoft a ton of money to buy.
You still didn't answer my question. You merely did back of the envelope math of potential profit.
Let me repeat it for you:
> What is much (or not) to you?
..................
>Not really, there's a load of marketing talk but State of Decay 2 has fallen off the face of the Xbox Live's most played games at the time of writing this and before you start crying for a source here you go, if it's there by the time you see this maybe it'll have changed but I can't imagine by much.
Yet it exceeded MS expectations. Of course anyone can have "higher" expectation and proclaim it low. Heck, you don't have any hard numbers on that list. That is why it is called "relative".
> Not just critics but also developers,
What is that supposed to mean?
>No that isn't just an opinion, if you were to say the same thing in a court of law you'd be laughed out of the room.
The only one being laughed at is you right now. You don't know what contract work is.
>The same guy who said who said Sea of Thieves would be "2018's PUBG"? Sure looks like a completely unbiased journalist to me?
Yup, an opinion makes him unbiased. /s
Goes in line with your other "I can't imagine" things.
>No I'm pretty sure they could have sued for embezzlement if there was any, a similar situation happened with Sega and Gearbox with Alien Colonial Marines but Sega couldn't sue because technically Gearbox fulfilled there end of the deal, they completed the game and released the game on the agreed release date but Scalebound was never finished.
I don't know what to tell you man. If you told that in a court of law, you'd get perplexing looks of confusion at the stupidity of that statement. Video games are delivered by milestones. Look it up, Mr I know how it all works.
>So like I said, there's a clear line of communication between the Devs and Publishers and they're someone to ensure deadlines are met.
That has literally nothing to do with how much a studio and MS negotiates how much they are going to pay. A studio can literally say, I want 100 million or 10 million, and MS can ya, nor nay. Having a producer has nothing to do with that.
>You're one of the smuggest, most condescending people yet you're pathetically misinformed about basic steps in game design.
No, I just met somebody that makes a shit ton of assumptions and can't imagine any other way. It speaks more about lack of imagination than anything else.
>Source them.
Try this book, it's a great read: https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Sweat-Pixels-Triumphant-Turbulent/dp/0062651234
>Something presented without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. Until you can provide something besides a flimsy rumor, I don't believe it.
Evidence is the rumor. Believe it or not, up to you. That said, I can say that about everything else you have said.
For instance, prove that Platinum Games spending money they earn on contract work on other projects is embezzlement. I'm waiting.
In fact, prove that GaaS makes all games bad and while you are at it, prove that the cost of purchasing Ninja Theory is not a lot.
>Plenty of games have tons of planned content and features axed and since Microsoft was willing to ax full video games in mid-development, it's not outside the realm of possibility for them to ax a gimmicky TV tie in.
Then you are thorougly confused about how video game development work. The TV tie in is a design pillar of the game.
>Again just saying "Your opinion" does invalidate my statement. Also I can fathom it, but it's literally the least likely scenario.
It does, because it is just an opinion. Not a universal fact. I can have an opinion as well. I like yellow. What color do you like?
https://www.resetera.com/threads/microsoft-studios-partners-current-and-future-landscape.1061/page-465#post-7839552
>Nobody refuted him? It's pretty easy to refute his Scalebound claim.
Please do so. Your opinion doesn't count nor does it serve as proof or evidence.
>So because people like these games and actively indulge in these practices make these practices any less scummy and predatory?
Yes, because they by and large don't complain. In fact, many of them actively embrace it. Just because you think it is predatory doesn't mean it is. We already established though, you thought RBS implemented it well.... Are you now backtracking and claiming it is predatory and hence bad?
> Oh I guess you just gave a pretty good argument for justifying most atrocities throughout history.
Depends on what you consider atrocity.....
>Let me repeat it for you:
> What is much (or not) to you?
You're complaining about me being vague yet you're asking vague questions. To ME 20 million would be a fuckton of money but to a company that spends 10 million on making a game, 20 million is not a lot.
>Yet it exceeded MS expectations. Of course anyone can have "higher" expectation and proclaim it low. Heck, you don't have any hard numbers on that list. That is why it is called "relative".
What the hell were Microsoft's expectations exactly? Apparently Quantum Break exceeded expectations but it didn't warrant a sequel.
> What is that supposed to mean?
That's developers also share these self evident criteria for a good game. No developer sets to purposely make a buggy, repetitive, shallow game. Also don't come at me with that low tier shit like "Just because you can't imagine, doesn't mean it doesn't happen"
>The only one being laughed at is you right now. You don't know what contract work is.
Coming from the idiot who doesn't know about game development.
>Yup, an opinion makes him unbiased. /s
Having such a blatantly wrong opinion is a clear case for bias, Sea of Thieves was clearly going to turn out to be a No Man's Sky situation although that doesn't mean it won't be a better game in like 2 years.
>I don't know what to tell you man. If you told that in a court of law, you'd get perplexing looks of confusion at the stupidity of that statement. Video games are delivered by milestones. Look it up, Mr I know how it all works.
Dude are you fucking stupid? Aliens Colonial Marines met it's milestones so Sega couldn't sue where as Scalebound didn't meaning Microsoft could at least attempt legal action if they believed something fishy was going on.
>That has literally nothing to do with how much a studio and MS negotiates how much they are going to pay. A studio can literally say, I want 100 million or 10 million, and MS can ya, nor nay. Having a producer has nothing to do with that.
We weren't talking about negotiating 10s of millions dollars though, we were talking about Microsoft giving money to studios (like platinum) to spend on games they paid to make and I essentially said that Microsoft would have someone ensure that doesn't happen by ensuring deadlines are being met and that funds are being used properly.
>No, I just met somebody that makes a shit ton of assumptions and can't imagine any other way. It speaks more about lack of imagination than anything else.
Assumptions really? Christ you're a smug prick.
>Try this book, it's a great read: https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Sweat-Pixels-Triumphant-Turbulent/dp/0062651234
LOL you throw a bitchfit over me telling you to Google something and link me a book? Get the fuck out of here.
>Evidence is the rumor. Believe it or not, up to you. That said, I can say that about everything else you have said.
The rumour is hardly evidence.
>For instance, prove that Platinum Games spending money they earn on contract work on other projects is embezzlement. I'm waiting.
Look up the definition of embezzlement.
>In fact, prove that GaaS makes all games bad and while you are at it, prove that the cost of purchasing Ninja Theory is not a lot.
Hahahaha okay so I've brought up valid reasoning why it's logical to assume that the Ninja Theory's acquisition wasn't a lot and your response is.... "Nah huh prove it"
>Then you are thorougly confused about how video game development work. The TV tie in is a design pillar of the game.
Jesus Christ you're dense, it's might be a pillar but it doesn't mean that it can't be removed. It literally had little effect on the actual game
>It does, because it is just an opinion. Not a universal fact. I can have an opinion as well. I like yellow. What color do you like?
Christ you're so fucking petty and dumb. It's like saying "I can't imagine eating shit and Liking it" and you were to say "It's just you're opinion", people probably do eat shit and like it but it's an UNLIKELY SCENARIO.
>Please do so. Your opinion doesn't count nor does it serve as proof or evidence.
It's not just an opinion, it's a logical argument based on the deduction of the available facts.
>Yes, because they by and large don't complain. In fact, many of them actively embrace it. Just because you think it is predatory doesn't mean it is. We already established though, you thought RBS implemented it well.... Are you now backtracking and claiming it is predatory and hence bad?
Already answered that in my other comment.
>Depends on what you consider atrocity.....
Jesus fucking Christ, how about slavery, genocide, systematic racism etc. None of these things can happen without a massive group of people "embracing" these actions as moral.
Try this Blood, Sweat & Pixels
Take "Blood, Sweat, and Pixels" for example, I just purchased a new copy from Amazon and on the publisher info page inside it says "1st Edition", and the "National Bestseller" text is worked into the cover graphic in a rather integral way. Does that mean some people have the same exact copy just without that text?
Edit: here's the link
Here you go, link for you:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Blood-Sweat-Pixels-Troubles-Triumphs/dp/0062651234/
£12.xx
Blood, Sweat, and Pixels
https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Sweat-Pixels-Triumphant-Turbulent/dp/0062651234/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1504183877&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=jason+schreier
Yeah, I think it's pretty wild stuff. It just blows my mind that the biochemical network within a cell can be influenced by the emergent properties of the network itself (instead of any physical or chemical properties). The behavior of a network translates across applications - it's weird. Here's what got me into it - it's a pretty approachable read for the topic.
how does that compare to this
Understanding the depth, complexity and interdependency of the systems on which we are relying to base our daily lives on, it's tempting to imagine a world collapse if something breaks down. Heck, it's ever fun and productive - taking in mind all the implications of such a major event.
Power(\internet\financial computer systems) is off - what happens? demographically, economically, health-wize, politically(on both federal,regional and international levels) and in bazillion different aspects our life will change in ways we can't imagine.
However, these scenarios, though tempting, are unlikely to the negligible level. It's not because they are designed in a robust form to withstand all bumps and tensions. It's because they are not.
All these systems are dynamic, evolved complex processes that adjusted (and still are) to answer different gravities, shocks and shifts.
In essence, that means that a simultaneous failure of all the AOL servers(holding a major part of the internet backbone) will probably adjust the form of routing data physically and logically through the system. It will affect billions of people, dollars, jobs, email accounts and watts, but it will not kill the internet. It will change the internet as we know it, but facebook changed the internet as we know it. Every word of the implementation of TCP\IP changed it, maybe more than the outage of AOL servers. "Shutting it down" means a dysfunction in hundreds of thousands of machines, designed and functioning in various ways, connected with each other. (or, damage done to hundreds of extremly protected, backed-up and well designed machines). A good review of the vulnerabilities of complex, organically evolved networks are well described in a book I know (sorry for the ad. It just felt relevant)
TL;DR
the collapse the internet, or any complex organic system is very interesting but involves an extreme(very, very extreme) cataclysm that will alter the whole system to unknown, new system. Otherwise, randomly placed damages to the system are part of it's every day evolution and will not change the system as we know it.
(Replace "system" with "internet" so it'll be an easier read)
Thanks for asking. Very often our (hopefully undeserved) reputations keep others from asking us anything.
There are many good answers here, but if you wish to know how Christiany became dominate, perhaps you would enjoy the explaination in Linked: How Everything is Connected and What it Means.
What is really interesting (not in the book) is what happened to the Roman priests, or what didn't happen. It seems they just switched to being Christian Priests, in many cases they didn't even change their ceremonies or messages! Fun stuff.
> None of them seem to have any effect on the exchange of (legal) ideas or an attack on legal activities on the web.
The actions I listed redefined what was legal, so yes they had a huge effect.
It used to be legal to 'crack' computer games (because you owned them); software was even sold to do that (CopyIIPC). It was legal to reverse-engineer data formats that incorporated encryption/obfuscation code. It was legal to implement anything in software without fear of a patent suit (because software could not be patented).
Even the idea of 'unauthorized computer access' wasn't set in stone legally: Operation Sundevil was largely a prosecutorial failure.
The digital landscape changed so much between 1990 (when I got on) to now that it's largely unrecognizable. These things you think are reasonable actions were beyond the pale power grabs 20 years ago.
> Copyright belongs to the owner of the copy-written material, be it corporate or personal. I am a designer. Are you trying to say that my freelance designs are owned by corporations?
Before the DMCA, copyright offenses were a civil issue up to a reasonable dollar amount, i.e. no prosecutor would care about a few copied CDs but they might go after a counterfeit manufacturing ring; today you can be jailed for 20 tracks. Reverse engineering was strictly legal in all circumstances; today, foreign nationals who decode eBook formats can be apprehended at our airports on a layover. Used to be content could only be taken down if it was stored on machines that were themselves evidence for a criminal investigation; today it can be taken down with just an email from the right person (no judicial oversight). Perfectly legal material is now routinely pulled from the web just on the say so of a large corporate entity. Established musicians who have copyright to their own songs find songs on their own sites pulled by takedown notices from their label's parent organizations. This is what I mean.
EDIT: Forgot to respond to this:
> As far as the lack of expectation of privacy on the web is a given.
It didn't use to be. The idea of automatically scanning of all emails for interesting stuff was so far beyond what technology could do that Tsutomu Shimomura bragged about his ability to sample just the traffic at one mid-size ISP (Netcom) to find Kevin Mitnick's data, and he needed Netcom's admins to give him permission for it. No one had the CPU power to do it on a large scale, and every network was the jurisdiction of its admins. Today all traffic is routinely monitored and no one is asked for their permission.
In summary, some of the limitations were technical, some were legal, but the general thrust has always been more government power over the data flow and more restrictions on what exactly is 'legal', to the benefit of corporations over regular citizens. Not a knock on Obama, this is fully bipartisan. But 20 years after I got on the Net random strangers I chat with think this unprecedented level of information control is both normal and reasonable.
The only book that I've read (currently reading) is Managed services in a month, haven't got to the part where they (if they) talk about that stuff. You're well established so I'm not sure if it would help you.
Still a GREAT book! Here's the link:https://www.amazon.com/Managed-Services-Month-Successful-Business/dp/0981997856/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1473283679&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=managed+services+in+a+month
If you do TnM you will never have any leverage in the business. Even if you're a one man show you'll struggle to take a vacation. If you build a large business your revenue will always be trading dollars for hours.
The MSP model, while tougher to get started, will get you much further in the long run. You should try to create 3-6mths of buffer to get started, it won't happen overnight, but don't get discouraged. You can shorten this period if you win a client before leaving your current job.
This doesn't mean you can't build up some TnM clients before you start to sell an MSP offering, just don't get stuck there forever.
I have a blog post about what the "best" MSP pricing model is you can check it out here.
Karl Palachuck has this book that would be helpful. The book has some specifics about what to include and how to price etc.
Tech Tribe would be useful as well. Currently closed, but can register for the waiting list. Tech Tribe is run by Nigel Moore, who you can listen to interviewed here. He also has a book coming out that details the specifics of building a pricing plan.
Read The Phoenix Project its a very well done narrative of the struggle of setting up quality change management. It goes from simple to culture changes, to proper CM practice.
>How did you get started in DevOps?
I watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdOe18KhtT4. I realised this was the future and if you wanted to be in a high performing organisation you need to do what they're doing.
Unless you're in an organisation that is willing to undergo the cultural change of Operations and Development working together you're probably not going to go far. Creating a devops organisation from scratch is HARD unless everyone is on board.
Looking into the technology is the simple part, try reading around the movement. Pheonix Project (http://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262509) is a good start, from there I'd look into Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Continuous-Integration-Improving-Software-Signature/dp/0321336380 & https://www.amazon.co.uk/Continuous-Delivery-Deployment-Automation-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321601912).
If by this point you don't know a programming language you're going to be in serious trouble. Learn something, be it Powershell (and honestly you probably will want to move onto C# if you want to be amazing at what you) or Python/Ruby.
Honestly you should be working towards what Google does with SRE if you want to be at the leading edge. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Site-Reliability-Engineering-Production-Systems/dp/149192912X.
I'm not clear on the pipelines from developers' machines to production deployment, both today and as you'd propose given current restrictions.
Also, you might want to revisit your Vagrant/Ansible thoughts in the context of what your corporate peers are considering. It's not unreasonable that they are considering rearchitecting their current dev-->deployment strategy and you don't want to be seriously out of step with it to avoid a lot of wasted effort.
Of course, what you'd really want is to work collaboratively with your peers to come up with a strategy to iterate to a modern dev-->deployment workflow that everyone could use, targets Rackspace or generic public IaaS provider, and "breaks down some of the legacy silos" as the saying goes.
It's not irrational to think that the current restrictions could be rethought, You'd need to get the infosec, compliance, and bean counters on board. Needs exec sponsorship.
Have you read the Phoenix Project? Often cited as a starting place. Cheesy in spots, but an interesting read on the process. Not the detailed cookbook you were asking for, but those exist, too. Just need the earlier clarifications.
And if you haven't already, read "The Phoenix Project."
I'm a big fan of Gene Kim. one of his books, the first half was a very gripping documentary about a former employer.. (at least I assume!)
Another "lunches" book to read after the first is Powershell Toolmaking in a month of lunches there's another book coming out on the matter of Scripting later this year.
Also, for reference see if you can get Powershell in Action
It was written by the man who architected and designed the bloody thing, so you're in good hands. I've not read it cover to cover, but it's certainly the definitive reference on the subject.
All above books rated 5/5 stars on amazon by a lot of people.
If you're so bogged down, stitched up and scared to even think about automating anything, then I'd absolutely recommend The Phoenix Project this is the paradigm shift IT has gone through over the past decade. Essentially, IT has taken on board efficiency and best practices that have been standard in the manufacturing industry for decades, to incredible success.
Seriously, "Bag of Nails" IT shops are on their way out. If they're that unwilling to take a step back and do things the smart way, they're a shit company to work for. Learn about technical debt and why it's critical to pay it off.
DevOps and Site Reliability are in essence the latest buzzwords in IT service management, but there's a lot of positive change going on in the industry off the back of it. There's a sort of productivity Gold Rush.
If you're bogged down your current job sounds like the perfect place to cut your teeth and leapfrog off the back of it to move into a better organisation who wants to work smart.
Have fun!
Read this if you haven't already:
https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592
That's a great book! I also recommend this book /u/sudz3 → The Phoenix Project
You can try channeling that passion into trying to save the organization. Can you utilize or build tools that make managing things easier? I would imagine you are, but if you're not, have you looked at configuration management stuff like puppet, chef ansible or saltstack? Orchestration tools like mcollective, fabric or capistrano?
It sounds like you have a lot of issues with the dev side of things and the whole silo thing is a pretty well understood problem at this point. Can you introduce devops concepts? This book might be a good place to start:
The Pheonix Project
If you're going to go down the savior path, one key thing that you have to remember is that you might fail and they'll continue down the path until they have no choice but to deal with it or go under. And I would say that failure is quite likely too, you're going to be viewed as someone that makes waves. If you don't demonstrate the value of the change and/or don't hold a lot of political capital, you're going to be fighting uphill.
The Pheonix Project is a wonderful read and even has a gripping story. I think it was my first audible book.
DevOps is a pretty large field and it is not only tech.
For beginners I would recommend reading the Phoenix Project, it's a novel about a bunch of ppl and you follow along as they make the journey from traditional IT to the DevOps way. It's a nice introduction, though it does not give you answers for how to do DevOps (https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592).
DevOps is the next step in making Development and Operations work better together with less friction. To achieve this one needs more lean processes and better tooling.
The tooling part is where you would put automation that help lessen the burden of everyone.
DevOps is a bit in the hype, and many understand it as a magical bullet that will make everything so much easier. Though this is not true, it takes a lot of effort to develop and maintain automation.
I'm working mostly with VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services) and Azure. Here I develop Powershell code to make it easier for code to flow through our different environments by leveraging tech to help remove some of the more burdensome processes.
Though if Operations does not already have a good ITSM framework in place, and you have Developers that just want do whatever the hell they fancy. The road to DevOps will be a hard one.
I did not have much DevOps experience when I started, though I had a strong background from Ops where I was well versed in how to merge processes and tech beforehand. So it was just an extension of this. Also my Powershell skills are good enough so I can write the automation I discover is needed as I investigate the existing glue in place between Dev and Ops.
I would say the biggest hindrance for most to do great DevOps is control of WIP (Work in Progress). This is Business Projects, Internal Projects, Operational Change and Unplanned Work. If one can visualize all these types of WIP flowing through Dev and Ops, one have a good foundation to build the rest on top of.
https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592
Read https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592 and share it with your team.
My husband is an IT director and he said https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592
Do what your boss is telling you to do.
Let. it. break.
If the halls runneth over with trouble tickets, just do your 40 hours and go the fuck home.
Patching it along is making the case that "This doesn't need fixing, because it still works."
Go read "The Phoenix Project", and quit being a Brent. You're doing things wrong, and your company is hurting because of it.
> trilogy
The one I read was a single book.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Phoenix-Project-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592
DevOps is a tough field to break in to. A lot of companies will expect you to come in and know what you're doing right away - especially from a security standpoint. Managing infrastructure for your organization is a really big deal, which is why there is so much emphasis on Linux administration and deep understanding of how to secure those resources.
Going from web development to devops is a pretty big change - really they are two separate career paths. Not that you couldn't do it, but it will be a difficult transition for someone that hasn't done that kind of work before.
I think you need to assess what it is in the technology sector that interests you before you make a decision on which path to go down. Doing Devops-style work is super fun and rewarding, but like I said - it is a completely different field than traditional SWE.
If you do look in to the devops path, I would highly suggest reading Google's SRE book (it's free on PDF -https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/toc/index.html). This will give you a really comprehensive breakdown on what aspects of the SRE/DevOps that you will want to focus on to be successful.
e: also - the Phoenix Project (https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592). A must read for any DevOps hopefuls out there.
Learn the fundamentals of devops and how it relates to your company's technology usage and process.
Read the Phoenix Project, it will give you a better insight on how devops fits in with IT in general.
https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592
For technical skills it wouldn't hurt to know improve your scripting/programming skills.
I dunno...sounds nice in theory, but it's going to make you more of a cost-center than they already think you are. Half of your job is going to be demonstrating that you ADD value to the organization, not just be a big money pit. And that's without tying up development resources on things that look a lot like a big money pit in the eyes of upper management. I don't know what your timeline is, but is it long enough for development?
Come to think of it, maybe read this...it's almost like Zen and the Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance but for IT management, or a big long parable (That is, it's a relatively short book, but long as parables tend to go...or is it an allegory...meh). I don't know, I thought it was interesting, and I'm just a tech (that said, only picked it up because it was during a free promo.)
Also, for some reason I keep thinking "Maybe Reading the Phoenix Project might help." It was free on amazon a few months ago so I read it (thanks to the people here for the suggestion) and it was interesting. There are tons of eye roll moments and it can be silly at times but it does help your thinking when it comes to being buried in neck deep in projects. It's probably worth the $10 to read it as a piece of fiction alone.
http://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262592/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1369923896&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+phoenix+project
Yes, most scientists (but not all) do believe in an AI singularity. And when polled AI researchers' have a median prediction of that occurring within 45 years.
The idea is that once you've created an AI smarter than us (or at least better at AI programming) it will be able to program a better AI than us. Since we were able to program it and it is better at programming AIs, it will be able to program a better AI than itself. You would then have iterative generations each one smarter than the previous.
Some things to note however is that this won't be infinitely smart. Physics puts some upper limits on how much information can be processed how quickly and with how much heat and entropy. That being said those limits are huge and scientists don't know how much smarter it'll be than us. But even the idea that it could be just a little bit smarter than us but that you could network a bunch of brains just slightly smarter than us together is pretty scary.
Scientists also don't agree on how much of a risk this poses to humanity, but most believe it is a risk that needs to be taken very very seriously. But many also believe it is a risk that when taken very very seriously can be properly managed. Look at how successful Bezos or other Billionaires are. An AI like this could absolutely run the world if it wanted. And forget about shutting it down. It would be smart enough not to do anything that would scare us enough into shutting it down until it had protected against that possibility.
Where the world ends up after the AI singularity depends so much on the goals of that initial AI superintelligence.
For more information on AI's check out this computerphile video. That researcher has about 10 or so videos on computerphile on the same subject. If you want a really in depth view on the state of AI super intelligence, I'd recommend Life 3.0 which is by an AI researcher who has been organizing AI saftey conferences and been working with Elon Musk and others to fund AI researchers' work. They discuss what are the different types of scenarios we could end up with and asks interesting moral questions about where we want to end up. For example, do we want to be in a world where nobody has to work or would that lead to lack of fulfillment in people's lives? Would we want an AI who would only minimally interfere and mainly function to prevent malicious AIs from emerging? Or would we want one that would push the frontiers of science for us?
>so as long as they dont have any biological part in them and they have no actual feelings
Lol. What makes you think you have actual feelings? I think therefore I am. It thinks therefore it is, and it will think quicker and better. It will have a larger brain and more room for improvement.
>I think its just farfetched to think that a robot AI woman made for acting as your partner is ever going to get out of control and use a gun to shoot stuff, they will make sure that it will be a safe tech obviously, its going to be their number one priority, to make sure such a thing isnt going to ever happen with an AI robot.
You can't box in an AI like that. You can make it safe enough for market, but sooner or later one is going to go rogue and one is all it takes.
>I think robots are not to be afraid of at all, the real threat to humanity is humanity itself...
How many AI's have you built? How much do you know about the topic? I'm glad you're more of an expert then idiots like Elon Musk and Steven Hawking. AGI is rediculusly dangarous, and using that tech for a sex toy is beyond stupid and irresponsible. Then again we're more then likely to get AGI over the next couple decades and this Reddit will stay that lang. So when some abused AGI goes back and starts looking for who to blame... well I wouldn't want to be you dude...
Here is a book to read https://www.amazon.com/Life-3-0-Being-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/1101946598/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&amp;pd_rd_i=1101946598&amp;pd_rd_r=VRR6AQ5K4WE1BXNWW0EP&amp;pd_rd_w=FIKob&amp;pd_rd_wg=x2u0q&amp;psc=1&amp;refRID=VRR6AQ5K4WE1BXNWW0EP
Look man if you're unhappy Openwater will give you matrix you can be anything in
https://www.reddit.com/r/openwaterBCI/
Dev kits this year, consumer product the next. As soon as they get enough data and they will they will be running a full blown matrix. Smell, touch, everything... No need to endanger humanity by messing with stuff you really shouldn't mess with. AGI is better off doing more significant things.
As a short-term goal, I would say creating AGI, which should lead to the technological singularity. I like to believe that once that happens, what we have created (and has self-improved) will be "smart enough" to solve things that will (at that point, not now) be "trivial" for it: climate change, poverty, war, free energy, etc
I started reading Life 3.0 14 months ago (switched from reading the book to listening to the audiobook a couple months in). I'm deliberately reading it slowly (and often going back to re-read slightly before where I left off) so I can savor it
I would love if everything turned out as awesome as that book paints a picture of humanity's future
Post-singularity, the possibilities are (nearly) endless: colonize Mars and several moons, maybe a few O'Neill cylinders and then spread throughout the galaxy (either in person or sending out robot ships while we all relax in our own VR worlds)
Read this book. Or listen to it on audible
The first short story presented at the start of the book is compelling
https://www.amazon.com/Life-3-0-Being-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/1101946598
https://www.amazon.com/Dreaming-Code-Programmers-Transcendent-Software/dp/1400082471
Dreaming in Code
Anyone here read Brave New War or Linked?
I recommend this book if anyone is interested in how he was caught. It's not the best literature, but it's totally readable.
http://www.amazon.com/Dreaming-Code-Programmers-Transcendent-Software/dp/1400082471
> Lol, what do you think all those containers and instances run on? Magic?
That's what you pay the cloud provider for.
> That is not what Devops is...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DevOps
https://smile.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Technology-Organizations/dp/1942788339
Wrong again.
Every game dev harms their employees.
This is the reason I didn't go into gamedev and instead went into IT. Being a game dev sucks. It's just a fact. Zeroing on one dev just because they are bit more disorganized than others isn't fair when they aren't doing anything other companies aren't already. I am watching that vid you sent me, 30 min atm and I haven't seen or heard anything that I havent seen or heard before.
I highly recommend reading this book.
You will view this situation differently then.
They're the same. It's manufacturing. It doesn't matter what each one builds.
Not that this justifies interruptions. Interruptions are bad in both cases.
I would suggest you as well as anyone reading this, especially those who are about to downvote it, to read this book. It is the most accessible and intuitive example of why software engineering is not an art as it is often referred to and thought of, but a very familiar assembly line.
Edit: Since this is getting heat here's an excerpt from a book covering research done on this:
>Trunk Based Development
>Our research also found that developing off trunk/master rather than on long-lived feature branches was correlated with higher delivery performance. Teams that did well had fewer than three active branches at any time, their branches had very short lifetimes (less than a day) before being merged into trunk and never had "code freeze" or stabilization periods. It's worth re-emphasizing that these results are independent of team size, organization size, or industry.
>Even after finding that trunk-based development practices contribute to better software delivery performances some developers who are used to the "GitHub Flow" workflow remain skeptical. This workflow relies heavily on developing with branches and only periodically merging to trunk. We have heard, for example, that branching strategies are effective if development teams don't maintain branches for too long - and we agree that working on short lived branches that are merged into trunk at least daily is consistent with commonly accepted continuous integration practices.
>We conducted additional research and found that teams using branches that live a short amount of time (integration times less than a day) combined with short merging and integration periods (less than a day) do better in terms of software delivery performance than teams using longer-lived branches. Anecdotally, and based on our own experience, we hypothesize that this is because having multiple long-lived branches discourages both refactoring and intrateam communication. We should not, however, that Github Flow is suitable for open source projects whose contributors are not working on a project full time. In that situation, it makes sense for branches that part-time contributors are working on to live for longer periods of time without being merged.
The book if you want to check their methodology / biases