Hugo Corbucci's Blog

Showing all posts tagged #book-reviews:

Building Micro services - by Sam Newman

Posted on November 2nd, 2015

This book provides a great overview of what are micro-services, how they came to be, the complications and advantages that come from designing your systems with micro-services.

Sam starts by providing an overview of micro-service architectures. Ease of change/upgrade, composability, polyglot environment, scalability and many others are some advantages that come with it. However, a micro-service architecture also...

Everything burns - by Vincent Zandri

Posted on March 28th, 2015

This exciting thriller is written under the point of view of Reece “Pieces" Johnston, a fairly famous author who managed to publish a best seller (The Damned) around 8 years prior to the books’ events and has been living out of its fame. The book starts telling us the story of Reece's young childhood and how he lost his mother and two older brothers to a fire and developed a pyromaniac pathology...

The Lean Startup - by Eric Ries

Posted on March 7th, 2015

This book has now become a classical for any person trying to start a company that isn’t going to replicate an established business. It may be a product (software or hardware) or a new service. So long as what you’re going to start isn’t just replicating an established and well understood business, you should read this book. The fact that it is associated to the start up world of...

The Fire Seekers (The Babel Trilogy Book 1) - by Richard Farr

Posted on February 28th, 2015

The book is a fiction story written in first person narrator called Daniel Calder, "not-as-bright" son of two "geniuses".

His father, William Calder, is a proeminent linguistic expert in essentially all ancient middle eastern languages, famous professor at the University of Washington. He is what is called a Babbler. Can talk at least 10 different languages and picks new ones up very...

Talking with Tech Leads - From Novice to Practitioners - by Patrick Kua

Posted on February 20th, 2015

In this book, Patrick Kua gathered a lot of interviews from multiple people that are or were, at some point, playing the role of Tech Lead in a team.

He starts off by defining what he is calling Tech Lead and how hard it is to tackle the role as most people are not really trained or prepared for it. His definition of Technical Leader is:

“A leader, responsible for a development...

Marked (The Servants of Fate - Book 1) - by Sarah Fine

Posted on February 14th, 2015

A nice fiction romance drags the reader through the Romeo and Juliet story of Cacy Ferry and Eli Margolis. Written in third person but with a narrator that alternates the view points of the story between Cacy and Eli’s make the feeling almost like a first person narration with some detachment.

Their surroundings reveal a post semi apocalyptic future in which Kers, ruled by Jason Moros, and...

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies - by Jared Diamond

Posted on February 6th, 2015

Summary

This anthropology book goes back in time before mankind was a dominant species and explores how we evolved the way we did.
The book starts off with a question which guides the book's line of thought: Why did Eurasians came to be the dominant human group and not native Americans, New Guineans, Australian Aborigines or SubSaharian groups?

The rest follows as a very summarized...

Reality is Broken - Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World - by Jane McGonigal

Posted on January 30th, 2015

Book summary:

The book starts by describing some principles that describe what a good game has/does. Jane summarizes it in 4 important points:

A goal: Important to give the player a sense of purpose
Rules: Limitations into how to achieve the goal. The limitations force the player to be creative while looking for...

Martians, go home - by Frederick Brown

Posted on January 23rd, 2015

Short science fiction story that touches on interesting matters, one of which fairly modern: the loss of privacy.

Frederick brown presents this novel in 3 parts: the arrival of martians on earth, their stay, their departure. The core is obviously around their stay although both opening and closing present interesting description of human reactions and...

Implementation Patterns - by Kent Beck

Posted on January 17th, 2015

Kent Beck provides on this book much lower level details into his programming preferences. He presents and discusses a lot of very common programming options and decisions.

Starting the book with some explanation into why those small decisions are...