Modern Software Engineering

Doing What Works to Build Better Software Faster

By: David Farley

Narrated by: Amy Gordon

Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins

Publisher's summary

Improve Your Creativity, Effectiveness, and Ultimately, Your Code

In Modern Software Engineering, continuous delivery pioneer David Farley helps software professionals think about their work more effectively, manage it more successfully, and genuinely improve the quality of their applications, their lives, and the lives of their colleagues. Writing for programmers, managers, and technical leads at all levels of experience, Farley illuminates durable principles at the heart of effective software development. He distills the discipline into two core exercises: learning and exploration and managing complexity.

For each, he defines principles that can help you improve everything from your mindset to the quality of your code, and describes approaches proven to promote success. Farley’s ideas and techniques cohere into a unified, scientific, and foundational approach to solving practical software development problems within realistic economic constraints. This general, durable, and pervasive approach to software engineering can help you solve problems you haven’t encountered yet, using today’s technologies and tomorrow’s. It offers you deeper insight into what you do every day, helping you create better software, faster, with more pleasure and personal fulfillment.

• Clarify what you’re trying to accomplish.
• Choose your tools based on sensible criteria.
• Organize work and systems to facilitate continuing incremental progress.
• Evaluate your progress toward thriving systems, not just more "legacy code".
• Gain more value from experimentation and empiricism.
• Stay in control as systems grow more complex.
• Achieve rigor without too much rigidity.
• Learn from history and experience.
• Distinguish "good" new software development ideas from "bad" ones.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2022 Dave Farley (P)2022 Dave Farley

For REAL software engineers

The best source so far on why there are software engineers and just programmers. Should be a staple in any software engineer’s library.

Excellent book

This is very good book that helps to clarify for granted, but still challenging concepts in sw dev
Inspirational and deeply knowledgeable

Setting foundations for better software engineerin

Very interesting book to make you think in new ways. Maybe I've missed similar books, but I consider this book a courageous and pioneering effort in unexplored areas.

I almost had to deduct one star because the listener is expected to follow code examples in the pdf, and in the situations I was listening to this book, there was no way for me to do it. I think that's the case for a lot of audio book listeners. The code examples could've been narrated in a sentence or two, since they're simple enough. Waiting for at least some description of the code being discussed over and over again, while getting none, was frustrating. Still, there weren't too many of these code samples, so it was a good listen overall. Otherwise, the narration was perfect.

Mastering Agile Excellence with CI/CD

David Farley's 'Modern Software Engineering' is an essential read for those looking to master Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), cornerstones of agile software development. Farley, a CI/CD luminary, presents a compelling argument for how these practices can dramatically improve team collaboration, feedback loops, and adaptability.

The book excels in aligning CI/CD with agile principles, illustrating how they foster a symbiotic relationship. Farley dissects how CI/CD alleviates the commonly stressful release processes, transforming them into routine, low-risk events. This shift is not just procedural but cultural, creating teams that are more engaged, efficient, and focused on quality.

Farley goes beyond theory, including real-world case studies that showcase how implementing CI/CD can lead to fewer production issues and a more robust codebase. The book is a beacon for software teams aiming for high performance and quality, demystifying the complex landscape of modern software engineering.

Whether you're a developer, manager, or technical lead, this book provides the blueprint for achieving agile excellence through CI/CD. It's not just informative—it's transformative.

Good!

You don't miss that much when listening to this book! Just a few diagrams and cliffnotes

Engaging even for a young devoper

I'm still early on in my career in software development. The information in this book was easily digestible and engaging. I learned a ton through this book and I'm looking forward to applying it in my career.

Great resource for guiding principles for software development

While most of the individual principles in this book are not new (Loose coupling, SoC, cohesion etc.) They are put into a coherent framework ideas about a process to achieve them is shown. I plan on encouraging all developers I work with to read and think about the concepts explained within.

Very good book

I liked several ideas from the book:

- the benefits of early feedback in the development process
- how TDD works. Even though I'm familiar with the concept, the author explains it in an easy to grasp manner and efficient to follow.
- the ways on reducing the complexity in the systems (in particular that the software development is mostly not about using particular technology or approach like object-oriented programming, but rather setting up processes that will help deal with the complexity)

And I definiely loved the stories from author's experience! In particular, the story about software development for the Moon program in NASA

I also liked the narration of the book!
Highly recommend!

Could have been a 1-page bulleted list

I've been a software engineer for 13 years. I bought this book after listening to a podcast interview of David Farley. The ideas in this book are all good ones, but I found the presentation very repetitive and light on real-world examples. This would probably be more useful for more junior developers.