Who doesn’t love a good book? The cold, dark and grey weather — at least in the Northern Hemisphere — is the perfect excuse to throw an extra log on the fire and sit down with a good book, and perhaps a glass of Glühwein.
With the holidays ahead, we asked our colleagues across Camunda to share their reading recommendations — from books to sharpen your skills, improve your code and inspire your leadership, to reads that will make you stop and think about personal development.
We hope you enjoy these books as much as we have:
Books to hone your Engineering Knowledge
Chris Zell, Software Developer
- Learning Chaos Engineering: Discovering and Overcoming System Weaknesses through Experimentation
- Chaos Engineering: System Resiliency in Practice
- Java by Comparison: Become a Java Craftsman in 70 Examples
- Java Performance: In-depth Advice for Tuning and Programming Java 8, 11, and Beyond
Learning Chaos Engineering laid the foundation for introducing chaos engineering and game days at Camunda.
Chris Zell, Software Developer
Josh Wulf, Developer Advocate
- Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
- The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master
Deepthi Akkoorath, Software Engineer
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems
Whether you build your own database or use one, it is important to know the foundational concepts behind it. This book covers several fundamental concepts from the internals of a storage engine, to challenges in distributed systems. The author does not go too deep into the theory, but goes deep enough to make it an enjoyable read. Highly recommended to anyone who is building scalable systems.
— Deepthi Akkoorath
Jan-Philipp Friedenstab, Engineer
Zoltan Tömböl, Site Reliability Engineer
- The Algorithm Design Manual, 3rd Edition
It is possible to write a book on a highly technical topic that is approachable and friendly enough for beginners to start with, while deep enough for professionals to learn from. Technical books are often dry and hard to read. This is definitely not the case here. Easy to follow proofs and anecdotes make this book a great read for everyone. Also, graphs are everywhere. Seemingly unrelated problems can be transformed into graph problems to which an optimal algorithm is already known.
— Zoltan Tömböl
Books to Boost your Career
Maxim Danilov, Engineering Manager CI Platform
A great intro to those switching from individual contributors to a manager’s role, covering all the important areas in a very concise form. Personal outtake: a great outlining of the difference between mentoring and coaching.
— Maxim Danilov
Stefan Wiese, IT Consultant
- Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware
Josh Wulf, Developer Advocate
- Being Geek: The Software Developer’s Career Handbook
- Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager
Parixit Naik, Marketing Operations Manager
Books to Nurture Personal Development
Nele Uhlemann, Technical Consultant
Communication is key in all human interactions and important in conflict management. Especially when we work remotely, non-verbal communication is missing and it is even more important to be able to listen and to express yourself empathically. I am fascinated by communication theories but often theories are hard to apply for all life situations. This book instead combines theories into a practical guideline that helps to reflect yourself and to improve your verbal interactions with others.
Nele Uhlemann
Rob Emsbach, Head of Technical Presales APAC
Josh Wulf, Developer Advocate
- Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success
- Dealing with Disrespect: Handling your critics, no matter what they throw at you
Niall Deehan, Developer Advocate
- Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
Parixit Naik, Marketing Operations Manager
Books to Inspire your Leadership
Jakob Freund, Co-founder and CEO
“Giving people freedom to make decisions autonomously is the right thing to do, but only if you have made sure that those people are the best possible match for the role they are assigned to. This can be a painful but necessary process.
My favorite quote from No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention: “Dispersed decision-making can only work with high talent density and unusual amounts of organizational transparency. Without these elements, the entire premise backfires.”
Jakob Freund
- Turn The Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers Into Leaders
- What You Do Is Who You Are
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
- High Output Management
- The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age
- No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention
Andre Bappert, Technical Product Manager
- EMPOWERED: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products (Silicon Valley Product Group)
- Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself
“The best thing you can do for your employees is to offer them an opportunity to grow personally and professionally – under the condition that they are able and willing to help growing the company. My favorite quote from The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age: “Gamson said he builds trust through honesty: “I know my employees are likely to leave the company at some point. Recognizing that fact doesn’t temper my interest in investing in them. On the contrary, it fuels it. Assuring them that it’s more than OK to talk together about their career, even if it doesn’t include LinkedIn, helps establish an atmosphere of open honesty, and helps them understand that we are aligned in our interest in making them better.”
— Jakob Freund
Books by Camundi
If you’re interested in what our Camundi are writing, as well as reading, make sure you check out:
Camunda Co-Founders Jakob Freund & Bernd Ruecker
Josh Wulf, Developer Advocate
Mary Thengvall, Director of Developer Relations
- The Business Value of Developer Relations: How and Why Technical Communities Are Key To Your Success
And don’t miss these titles, coming in 2021:
Practical Process Automation by Bernd Ruecker:
In today’s IT architectures, microservices and serverless functions play an increasingly important role. But how can you create meaningful, comprehensive, and connected business solutions if the individual components are decoupled and independent by design? This book provides a framework through examples and practical advice, and reveals how you can design complex processes in such an environment to deliver true business value. Systems that become more distributed, asynchronous, and reactive usually require state handling to deal with long-running interactions. Author Bernd Ruecker demonstrates how to use process automation technology to apply typical long-running patterns around resiliency, messaging, orchestration, or consistency without forcing your service implementation to become stateful itself. With this guide, you’ll discover how process automation compares to business process management, service-oriented architecture, batch processing, event streaming, and data pipeline solutions.
Cloud-Native Continuous Delivery by Mauricio Salatino:
Teams are wasting time reinventing common and well-established (in Open Source communities) practices and technical solutions that don’t directly benefit their companies. This book aims to provide examples of these practices applied using Open Source projects, such as KNative, Cloud Events, Jenkins X, Helm, Zeebe, Spring Cloud, etc. The readers of the book should be able to finish each chapter understanding how each tool can directly benefit them, what the alternatives are, and how to get started with a working example.
