Over time, the habit of reading became a hobby for me. At this point, I believe I have consumed more than a hundred books in my life (a few out of necessity, but the vast majority for pleasure). Many of them were about technology and software development, and many others were literature from the most diverse eras, styles, and cultures (which are not relevant to this post).

Since that year, twenty years have passed. Relevant to my profession, I have rated six books as “five stars” that I believe can also make a difference in any Software Developer’s career.

Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation

The book provides an understanding of the best practices that enable frequent, automated, and consistent software delivery. Each stage that makes continuous delivery possible is covered in detail. It is considered one of the foundational books on how to develop (and deliver) software at medium and large scale.

Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

I have come across source code written in terrible, poor, average, good, excellent, and exceptional ways. Unfortunately, there is still code today that is almost indecipherable — often in the form of a function (which should ideally be concise) but that contains more than one responsibility and poorly named variables. As a result, the cost of software maintenance is negatively impacted in such scenarios. Through recommendations and comparisons between well-written and poorly written code, Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) provides an understanding of why we do not write code for ourselves, but for others — especially for the people who, sooner or later, will have to maintain the software.

“We do not write code for ourselves, but for others”.

The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

A real-life drama set in an IT department. If you haven’t experienced it yet, you eventually will — and you’ll learn a lot from it. If you have, you’ll almost certainly find yourself laughing at how closely it resembles situations you’ve faced professionally. This book allows us to look at the day-to-day work of the company portrayed in its pages through a magnifying glass, so we can better understand how applying principles and practices helps us deliver value through software to our customers.

Scrum: Agile Product Development For Success

In 2014, I completed a Scrum certification. The course instructor was the author of this book. I was struck by the quality of his teaching and his relevance in the community that shares the values of Scrum and other agile methodologies. With exceptional clarity, Rafael Sabbagh explains the Scrum framework and the tools it offers to enable the development and delivery of high-quality software. After more than ten years in my career, I still carry with me the lessons I learned in that course — and which are also shared in this book.

More than just following the framework “by the book,” the most important part was learning the values of Scrum and apply them in the teams I work.

Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track

There is life beyond the senior level (and it’s not as a manager).

This simple-looking book holds a wealth of high-quality information — especially for software development professionals who have reached a high level of seniority and, after some time, find themselves asking, “What now?” The book shows that project management is not the only possible path — far from it. In many IT departments I’ve worked in, there was often a need for a technical professional with a more analytical and qualified perspective to help guide the direction the company should take. However, these professionals work closely with development teams, contributing principles, artifacts, working dynamics, architectural proposals… It’s a more horizontal approach within the organization. Will Larson successfully reveals this rarely explored world to those who want to better understand what being a Staff Engineer really means.

Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System

The book tells the story of the birth and day-to-day development of the operating system found on around 4 billion devices worldwide. It’s incredibly interesting to learn from this work what challenges were encountered — and how each of them was solved — in building the Android operating system. Chet Haase was part of this journey day in and day out and knows the details now shared across roughly 400 pages. From this book, I take away one lesson:

Never criticize a fellow developer’s work, because you don’t know the context in which that code was written.