Kill It with Fire

Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones) by Marianne Bellotti was recommended to me by a college classmate on a post I made on LinkedIn a while back. (Part of a series of observations about how terrible ZipRecruiter is.)

This book is great, and I would highly recommend it to any software engineer. It’s not only about modernizing software applications, but has a lot of insight into how being a long-lived project is a reasonably likely outcome for any project, and you can save someone in the future from a lot of trouble by making some better decisions up front.

It also leans into the human factors and business realities of how software is developed, something I feel like I have been complaining about here and elsewhere.