I don’t know how many times I’ve said “the legacy stuff” at work in the past six months, but it’s a lot. I picked up Kill It With Fire, which concerns itself with how to manage aging systems, because I’d been saying “the legacy stuff” a lot just as a colleague noticed the book.
This was perhaps an aspirational purchase: I do have a few folks dealing with some creaking, legacy stuff, and I thought it wouldn’t hurt to get a few pointers that would take me beyond my usual, deliberative, incremental self as I work with them. I did get some pointers, and also some great insights that go beyond dealing with mere technology.
It’d be a mistake to pass this book up because you don’t have to deal with legacy systems. It has plenty of insight to share around the general endeavor of building and maintaining complex systems and, maybe more importantly, dealing with the humans keeping those systems running.
Highly recommended.
Kill It with Fire by Marianne Bellotti 📚