review

I recently posted a review of Patterns for Performance and Operability by Ford et al on the SoftwareOperability website. I think that this book is exceptionally useful in its treatment of both performance and operability, and anyone who cares about how well software works in Production should buy and read a copy (there are paper and eBook editions).

Two other reviews might be useful too: my colleague Anant East (Head of Architecture and Infrastructure, thetrainline.com) wrote up a detailed review of Patterns for Performance and Operability on the tech blog at thetrainline.com, and I posted a short review on Amazon.

Learning from ‘Working Effectively with Legacy Code’ by Michael C. Feathers

Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael C. Feathers is a classic software development text. Not only is it still completely relevant when working with code, seven years after it was published, but also the approaches it advocates at the source code level are becoming essential to apply at the component and system integration levels too as our software systems become more complicated and polyglot, and we learn to fully automate our deployments and treat our infrastructure as code.

Book cover: Working Effectively with Legacy Code

For an overview of the book itself, read my review of ‘Legacy Code’ on Amazon.co.uk. I describe the different sections and how each is useful in a particular context. The rest of this article will focus on other aspects of Legacy Code, particularly the ‘why’ of changing code, and the implications for Continuous Delivery, infrastructure-as-code, and deployment automation.

Continue reading Avoiding Legacy with Deployment Automation and Infrastructure-as-Code