Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time (Grayscale Indian Edition) Paperback – 11 March 2020

Awesome book

-

While this book provides a very interesting insight into the problems faced at Google-scale in an organized manner never attempted before, I choose to rate it as a 3 because it isn't (in my opinion) indispensable.The first half is rather weak, not for lack of appreciation for the managerial skill that building good software takes, but because the book provides the same old cliches that most in software would have come across without providing substantially more motivation. Most of the takeaways are a few bullet-points at most.My other problem with the book is its (self-announced) myopia to Google. To most novice engineers who haven't themselves run into some of the problems described in the book, the motivations will continue to remain unclear and solutions further obfuscated within the Google-context/parlance. It is entirely possible I was reading it too lazily, but I personally find a barrage of case-studies of unrelated products rather tiring, especially when the content isn't organized in a way where the takeaways are clear.The second half picks up pace well as it is technical, and clearly closer to the author's day at Google than the former. I found some of the paradigms employed at Google very interesting as to stumble upon them online in one singular place is unlikely, so this book is your best bet.In summary:> If in your journey as a software engineer, you are yet to acknowledge software as a living, breathing thing, you will find little to no value for yourself in this book.> If you are at a point where you are seeing some scaling issues with your team or engineering process, this book is a must-read because it can provide for a few new paradigms.> If you are in a large traditional business, you will continue to remain in awe of Google and leave this book without too many actionables.> If you are in a large tech business, you likely don't need this book because your bootcamp covers it; however, it'll be a very fun read!Think of it like a very interesting conversation for hours with a Google engineer. He's smart and really experienced, but also incapable of any imagination outside of the Google box.

This book covers a wide variety of Software Engineering concepts. A software engineer's job is not just to write code and deploy, they should also think about scaling, cost - Capex, Opex, resource etc.We've faced the ill-effects of Hyrum's law and learned our lesson from it. For e.g,. I prefer descriptive field names though that'll lead to longer character length."Everything your organization has to do repeatedly should be scalable in terms of human effort."