Books like Design for Safety — picked by fans

I love pattern languages. And Team Topologies brings patterns for team types and their interactions. Most importantly, they address fundamental problems of the software industry: how teams organise for fast flow, and how teams cope with cognitive load. The book steams from the author's experience in the DevOps community, and it is widely used across the world. Last but not least, Team Topologies give us a language that support organisation evolution.

My journey in the world of software development has been arduous and challenging.

One of the common struggles we all face is the overwhelming number of solutions available, making it impossible to fully grasp everything at a deep level.

Just when I thought I had mastered an approach and felt competent in it, a new shiny approach would emerge, demanding my immediate attention. It often felt like a never-ending race to keep up with the ever-evolving field.

This constant pursuit of staying relevant as a software engineer can be frustrating, as it feels like we are always lagging behind the rapidly advancing world. I discovered that knowledge of specific technologies, frameworks, or libraries does not easily transfer across different technology stacks. They are too specific and lack universality. It was then that I turned my focus to more general principles of software engineering.

I realized that there are fundamental engineering… show more.

In my quest (you can also call it a professional career), I’m drawn to complexity since we create software for complex problems. There are books on Complexity Science; however, they are very academic. This particular book gives practical advice to cope with complexity. It acknowledges the balance between the emotional and rational sides and why we must bring our full-self to any aspect of our life. The “don’t be emotional, this is work” proves to be a threat to our mental well-being and kills innovation in a company. In the book, the authors explore how to listen to our bodies in the face of complexity in an accessible way.

Accelerate is a book about data. The authors used data collected during their PhD projects in order to prove The DevOps is effective.

They have all sorts of different ways to measure DevOps, it sufficiency, and the fact that way more projects succeed when you do DevOps, rather than waterfall methodology.

The book essentially show can be used as evidence of return on investment when modernizing your IT department. I am a person who loves data, and thus I absolutely love this book. Also, if you listen to the audiobook version, one of the authors reads it to you and her personality really shines through in a fun way.

I really enjoyed listening to Nicole read a book about to me about data!

This is the first volume of a two-volume, tour de force, which jointly offers 29 specially written papers by major contributors to the field that broadly explore the genesis of technological change and the ways it is commercialized and diffused.

It is an invaluable source of literature surveys of the many different areas covered within the definition of the economics of innovation and also provides predictions of fruitful research directions.

Having myself edited a Handbook some years earlier I know both the time and effort involved but also the extent of knowledge dissemination that a book such as this can provide.

Palfrey is not just a known authority on internet law and emerging media, but also the former head of the prep school Phillips Academy, Andover; the former executive director of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, a research center that studies cyberspace and internet-related legal issues; the head of the MacArthur Foundation; and, I learned before speaking with him, a great-great-grandson of Teddy Roosevelt. This book, newly updated, delves into the myriad permutations of what it means to grow up in a digital world, with your every move captured and publicized. Yes, it focuses on children growing up digital, but it will be of interest to anyone who has questions and concerns about the future of privacy—meaning, just about all of us. 

I think I’m on my third or fourth copy of this book, because I keep giving it away! This is an absolutely stunning, gorgeously illustrated book about the spacesuits worn by Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong during the moon landing. The bid to design the suits was won by the Playtex Corporation—the lingerie company!—over a bunch of industrial materials suppliers, because Playtex knew how to design for the body in ways the other firms didn’t. The book is organized into twenty-one chapters, in homage to the twenty-one layers of the spacesuit, and it’s a thing of beauty. It weaves together the history of aeronautics, the politics of the Space Race, technology design, and mid-century fashion so seamlessly, and makes you think about each of these topics differently.

This Thing Between Us is a strange, mesmerizing, and oddly funny story about one man’s grief and how it leads to an invasive, evil force penetrating our world from the beyond. In part, it’s a haunted house story, but the ghost is in the machine—specifically a smart speaker named “Itza,” which is Moreno’s version of Alexa. I had the idea to a write a haunted house novel in which the house is haunted by a computer, but Gus beat me to it, and did it ten times better than I could have. You won’t read anything like this one, I promise. 

Future Politics takes the conversation to the societal level, looking at how technology will change the fabric of our communities. Susskind brings an expert eye to a sweeping body of knowledge and resists simple narratives. This book is dense, but worth the effort for those looking to understand the dynamics that will shape society as we know it, for better and for worse.

Susskind is a scholar of history and politics and brings that love of fundamental political questions to this work. I enjoy how he anchors modern questions about the implications of technology for freedom, for example, in much older debates about freedom and the State.

I am intrigued by James Bridle’s thought-provoking critique of the information age. He reveals how the rapid advance of technology has obscured, rather than clarified, our understanding of the world. Bridle masterfully dissects the societal crises born of big data, AI, and digital networks, painting a vivid picture of our “new dark age.”

His emphasis on the unknowability of complex systems resonates deeply with me, particularly my interest in exploring how AI often operates beyond human comprehension. Bridle’s call for transparency and ethics in technology mirrors my own arguments for robust governance in AI and autonomous weapons.