About Dagi

I think my articles, podcasts, talks, and interviews, alongside the books that have inspired me most, best convey how I think about leading people, architecture, culture, and the other things that fall under software engineering.

Articles and interviews

• My journey — A programmer approaching forty
• We aren’t Google, and shortcuts like oxygen tents don’t work
• On leading and motivating developers
• What a mud-stomping soldier has in common with a developer doing grunt work
• Lemmings, or on wasting human potential
• The glory and misery of IT interviews, from the other side of the table
• Mikhail Kalashnikov’s legacy for software development
• Failure is inevitable, and the flap of butterfly wings that deleted our database
• Testing in production
• DevOps experiences

Talks

• Zonky DevOps
• Why I stopped programming and don’t regret it, subtitled lead or follow
• Biggest failures and lessons learned

Books

• Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Ideas from this book inspired how Amazon and Netflix design processes and systems to grow more resilient and resist erosion. Failure is inevitable, so we have to design systems and organizations to survive it and grow stronger. In engineering, this shows up in blameless postmortems and chaos engineering principles, for example.
• Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders. An essential book on leading people, and a real eye-opener for me. Tell people what you want to achieve instead of giving them instructions. Otherwise you’ll drive yourself mad and never create principles and an organization that can outlast your departure.
• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. This book helped me understand indeterminacy, the role of uncertainty in our decisions, and why in development we should account for unknown unknowns (the importance of an MVP), fat tails in distributions, and asymmetry (see the article about the flap of butterfly wings).
• Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understandin Complex Systems, has this main idea: systems, processes, and organizations naturally erode, in IT and elsewhere. In trying to prevent this, we can no longer count on action equaling reaction. A local optimum in one part of a system can lead to disaster.
• Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software. An essential book on building distributed systems. Thinking about it, the book adapts the socioeconomic ideas of antifragility and black swans to technology and development. My review.
• Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations. Research and results on software engineering practices such as DevOps, CI/CD, and automation that distinguish low-performing companies from the ones you’d look to for inspiration.

You can follow my thoughts on Twitter, on the Roman Pichlík blog, or by listening to CZ Podcast.