Books I read in 2019

Here is a recap of all the books I read in 2019.

ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever

ReWork challenges the traditional ways software companies have embraced in terms of product development and management. It continues in the same line as Getting Real, a quite influential book in the early days of my career, but goes a bit deeper and touching some new aspects.

Most concepts presented will be familiar for those who have followed 37 Signals’ blog since its early days. But I think it’s useful to have them all collected in a book for future reference.

Remote: Office Not Required

Remote: Office Not Required is 37 Signals’ take on remote work. The book is divided in two big chunks. The first one explains why remote work is a perfectly valid alternative and debunks the excuses that we’ve telling ourselves to not adopt it. The second part gives plenty of sound advice for those brave enough to go remote first.

I found myself nodding at almost every statement while reading the book. It is a fantastic resource for identifying many problems we currently have in our offices and transitioning to a more modern workplace. On the other hand I think they should have put more emphasis on the fact that working remotely requires a particular set of skills that takes time to develop.

It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work

It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work, the last in 37 Signals’ trilogy about challenging the traditional workplace, focuses on having a calm environment that maximises productivity and boosts both company sustainability and employee happiness.

As someone that has recently suffered from prolonged periods of stress, which eventually led to symptoms of burnout, I can’t recommend these ideas enough. Insane competition, results maximisation and growth for the sake of growing are having a harmful impact on how companies develop their culture and treat their employees. This books offers a reality check and encourages a different approach for the workplace.

Outlander series

I liked the first season of Starz’s Outlander so much that I decided to give the novels by Diana Gabaldon a try.

The first one, Outlander, did not disappoint me. As far as I recall it is also the first long novel I have read completely in English. I really enjoyed it and it helped me learn a fair amount of vocabulary (including a wee bit of Scottish slang). But that also kept me wondering if I was missing nuances.

Dragonfly in Amber continues in the same narrative style, this time bringing the reader along two parallel storylines. The transition between them is very smooth and the story kept me intrigued until the end.

The third book in the series, Voyager, is where I felt Diana Gabaldon started to change her narrative style. Suddenly meaningless situations were being described with an incredible level of detail, while key events in the story were dealt with very quickly. I found some of the passages actually boring, but I couldn’t help coming back for the more exciting parts ¹.

Building Evolutionary Architectures

Building Evolutionary Architectures is a collection of recommendations and techniques for building an architecture that enables incremental change.

Strictly speaking, the authors’ take on the topic is not new. If you have followed recent advances in continuous delivery and are familiar with agile practices, specially around testing, everything will probably sound familiar.

But I found this book more approachable than other similar works and I consider it a very nice introduction that invites you to keep researching using more advanced material.

Domain-Driven Design

Eric Evans’ Domain-Driven Design is the canonical work that introduced this approach to software development.

It is a long book and not really easy to read. But it’s full of valid ideas to help you model a problem space in a useful and clean way. I learned the fundamentals of DDD on the job, but seeing them together in their context gave them an even more meaningful purpose.

Modern Auto Layout

I bought Modern Auto Layout in 2018 but I hadn’t had a chance to read it until 2019. Most of the content was not new to me, but it gave me reassurance that I was understanding and doing things correctly.

The only concept that maybe I had not understand fully and this book helped me consolidate was the relationship between layout guides, layout margins and safe areas, and how to leverage them to avoid unnecessary padding views.

App Architecture

I could lay my hands on objc’s App Architecture after participating in a workshop at work. Rather than trying to recommend any particular architecture, the authors highlight the pros and cons of a collection of them. I’d argue that it ends up revealing their flaws more than anything else, but I actually found that really valuable.

Also, considering that I fully endorse Dave Verwer’s opinion that “…there’s no such thing [as a perfect architecture], and you’ll waste endless time trying”, I really liked this book.