I’ve planned to read 36 books in 2016 and managed to hit that number a few hours before the NY! The best of those 36 books are listed below.
Business, Management and Leadership
Considering the new role I’ve started in January 2016 (first-time CTO of a growing startup company), my reading last year was heavily geared towards business, management and leadership topics. Here are my favourite books in this category:
- “The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers” — in my opinion, a must-read book for anybody interested in starting a company or already building one. A treasure trove of great advice for startup founders on building and managing their teams.
- “Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers” — the author explains why so many companies, that find an initial product-market fit, subsequently fail to grow into leaders of their respective markets and often die a slow and painful death. The concept of a chasm and, especially, the idea of the whole product were very powerful for my understanding of what I felt in many companies I worked for — mainstream customers could not use your product unless they are provided with a minimum set of components and services to solve their problem. Very important read for leaders of modern SaaS companies, especially for API/platform enterprises.
- “Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders” — an inspiring story of a navy captain transforming one of the worst-performing crews in the fleet into a perfectly functioning team by pushing control down to individual team members.
- “The Score Takes Care of Itself” — inspiring story of one of the best sport team transformations and the man behind it, legendary coach Bill Walsh.
Miscellaneous
Few more books I found very interesting:
- “The Collapse of Parenting: How We Hurt Our Kids When We Treat Them Like Grown-Ups” — maybe it is just a confirmation bias, but I absolutely loved this book. The author focuses on a few serious problems in today’s parenting and the resulting decline in the achievement and psychological health of American children. He finally managed put into words something that was bothering me for 10 years since moving to Canada. Now that I became a parent and would have to raise a child in this environment, I was glad to hear that I wasn’t crazy not to agree with the approach that is being pushed on modern parents by American society.
- “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End” — one of my favourite authors, Atul Gawande, explores the current state of end of life care in the USA, Canada, and Western Europe. Terrifying at first, the book makes you consider your own mortality and think about the choices you are bound to make eventually for yourself and, potentially, for your close family members.
- “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” — a captivating overview of our history as human species: from 70,000 years ago until the 20th century: how we evolved, how we affected other species on the planet and how did we end up where we are today. A long, but very interesting read!
- “The Road To Sparta: Retracing the Ancient Battle and Epic Run that Inspired the World’s Greatest Foot Race” — fascinating story of Dean Karnazes (one of the most famous ultra-distance runners in the world) and his exploration of the legend of the Marathon. Highly recommended to anybody interested in running.
- “Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father — and How We Can Fix It” — very detailed overview of what is broken in US healthcare today. Even if you don’t have anything to do with US healthcare market, the book is a great collection of stories about side-effects of what initially looked like great ideas, but ended up screwing the system even further.
Fiction
I was always a huge fan of sci-fi fiction and this past year I have discovered a few real gems that ended up on my all time favourite list:
- “Remembrance of Earth’s Past (aka The Three Body Problem)” series by a Chinese author Liu Cixin — huge universe, highly-detailed and powerful characters, timeline spanning centuries — you can find all of it here. But on top of the standard components of a good space opera, there is this previously unknown to me layer of Chinese culture, language, philosophy.
This trilogy has become an instant classic for me and is in the top-10 of my all time favourites next to Asimov’s “Foundation” and Peter F. Hamilton’s “Void”.
- Everything from Niel Gainman! Up until this year when I got exposed to his writing, I’ve never realized how much pleasure one could get from reading prose. I’m not sure how he does it, but if he were to publish a book of obituaries or classifieds, I’d be willing to read that too — I enjoyed his English so much! Favourite books so far: “The Graveyard Book” and “The Ocean at the End of the Lane”.
I hope you enjoyed this overview of the best books I’ve read in 2016. Let me know you liked it!
About 6 years ago (feels like an eternity in Rails world) working at Scribd I’ve started working on porting our codebase from some old version or Rails to a slightly newer one. That’s when I realized, that there wasn’t a ruby gem to help us manage MySQL connections for our vertically sharded databases (different models on different servers). I’ve started hacking on some code to replace whatever we were using back then, finished the first version of the migration branch and then decided to open the code for other people to use. That’s how the DbCharmer ruby gem was born.
For the next few years a lot of new functionality we needed has been added to the gem, making it more complex and immensely more powerful. I’ve enjoyed working on it, developing those features, contributing to the community. But then I left Scribd, stopped being a user of DbCharmer and the situation drastically changed. For quite some time (years) I would keep fighting to make the code work with newer and newer versions of Rails, struggling to wrap my head around more and more (sometimes useless) abstractions Rails Core team decided to throw into ActiveRecord.
Finally, in the last 2 years (while trying to make DbCharmer compatible with Rails 4.0) it has become more and more apparent, that I simply do not want to do this anymore. I do not need DbCharmer to support Rails 4.0+, while it is very clear that many users need it and constant nagging in the issues and the mailing list, asking for updates generated a lot of anxiety for me, anxiety I couldn’t do much about (the worst kind). As the result, since I simply do not see any good reasons to keep fighting this uphill battle (and developing stuff like this for ActiveRecord IS a constant battle!) I officially give up.
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As a leader of a technical operations team I often have to work on technical operations engineer hiring. This process involves a lot of interviews with candidates and during those interviews along with many challenging practical questions I really love to ask questions like “What are the most important resources you think an Operations Engineer should follow?”, “What books in your opinion are must-read for a techops engineer?” or “Who are your personal heroes in IT community?”. Those questions often give me a lot of information about candidates, their experience, who they are looking up to in the community, what they are interested in, and if they are actively working on improving their professional level.
Recently, one of the candidates asked me to share my lists with him and I thought this information could be valuable to other people so I have decided to share it here on my blog.
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As you may have heard, last January I have joined Swiftype – an early stage startup focused on changing local site search for the better. It has been a blast for the past 8 months, we have done a lot of interesting things to make our infrastructure more stable and performant, immensely increased visibility into our performance metrics, developed a strong foundation for the future growth of the company. Now we are looking to expand our team with great developers and technical operations people to push our infrastructure and the product even further.
Since I have joined Swiftype, I have been mainly focused on improving the infrastructure through better automation and monitoring, and worked on our backend code. Now I am looking for a few good operations engineers to join my team to work on a few key projects like building a new multi-datacenter infrastructure, creating a new data storage for our documents data, improving high-availability of our core services and much more.
To help us improve our infrastructure we are looking both for senior operations engineers and for more junior techops people that we could help grow and develop within the company. Both positions could be either remote or we could assist you with relocation to San Francisco if you want to work in our office.
If you are interested, you can take a look at an old, but still pretty relevant post I wrote many years ago on what I believe an ops candidate should know. And, of course, if you have any questions regarding these positions in Swiftype, please email me at [email protected] or use any other means for contacting me and I will try to get back to you as soon as possible. If you know someone who may be a great fit for these positions, please let them know!
Yet another small note about Cloudera Hadoop Distribution 4.3.
This time I needed to deploy some custom JAR files to our Hive cluster so that we wouldn’t need to do “ADD JAR” commands in every Hive job (especially useful when using HiveServer API).
Here is the process of adding a custom SerDE or a UDF jar to your Cloudera Hadoop cluster:
- First, we have built our JSON SerDe and got a
json-serde-1.1.6.jar file.
- To make this file available to Hive CLI tools, we need to copy it to
/usr/lib/hive/lib on every server in the cluster (I have prepared an rpm package to do just that).
- To make sure Hive map-reduce jobs would be able to read/write JSON tables, we needed to copy our JAR file to
/usr/lib/hadoop/lib directory on all task tracker servers in the cluster (the same rpm does that).
- And last, really important step: To make sure your TaskTracker servers know about the new jar, you need to restart your tasktracker services (we use Cloudera Manager, so that was just a few mouse clicks ;-))
And this is it for today.