Modern Software Engineering

Doing What Works to Build Better Software Faster

By: David Farley

Narrated by: Amy Gordon

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

An ideal reinforcement of less technical concepts

This book helped me to understand many overarching realities of software engineering. The repetition and overlapping nature of the concepts described in this book such as separation of concerns and continuous development left me feeling more confident going forward.

I’m very new to software engineering, my only project so far has been LUA scripting for TTS. But working my way towards a foundational approach to computing is a long-term goal of mine and this book fits right in to my library.

I’ll almost certainly give it another listen in the coming years as I learn more about the technology, and probably again, further in the future.