Books on Giedrius Statkevičius

"Observability Engineering" Book Review

Mon, 23 May 2022 14:39:43 +0000

A great, new book “Observability Engineering” came out very recently and I had to jump on reading it. Since it is very closely related to my work, I devoured the pages and read the book in about a day (505 pages). While doing so I wrote down some thoughts that I want to share with you today. They might or might not be true, I am only speaking about the book from my own perspective. Feel free to share your own thoughts!

Designing API Like It Is An Everyday Thing

Thu, 18 Jul 2019 21:35:39 +0000

Recently I have read a quite popular book called “The Design of Everyday Things”. I feel that with software slowly taking over more and more parts of the world, we could say that it also became an everyday thing and that we should design it like that. This blog post will be about it.

There are certain, general design principles that were explained in that book which we should apply to the process of programming in general.

2018 in books

Sun, 23 Dec 2018 10:05:30 +0000

Intro

2018 is coming to a close and so I thought that it would be a good idea to again look back on the books that I have read in 2018 and to share what books I have liked the most with my readers. I will mark the most liked books in bold like Aaron Swartz did in his lists. Also, I will expand a bit under the books which I liked the most and which are kind of controversial.

10 nuggets of knowledge that I picked up from "Code Complete"

Fri, 27 Apr 2018 22:15:59 +0000

You could probably find “Code Complete” by Steve McConnell in any of the top 10 lists of books recommended to read for all programmers. I recently finished reading that book too. I have to confess that at times the tips and knowledge in there was a bit too basic and fundamental but, on the other hand, I also think that it has a lot of golden nuggets of knowledge.

While reading it, I was writing down notes after every section. Essentially, they were three/four ideas that I thought were the most important in each section. Sometimes, they were paraphrased from the conclusions of each section written by the author himself. In other cases, I summarised them myself, in my own words.

Review of Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" for programmers

Wed, 25 Oct 2017 07:56:22 +0000

Programmers and IT people are often shunned for being shy, timid, fearful, or just in general - we are being thought of someone who have no social (soft) skills. If you can in any way identify with this sentiment - you definitely would be rewarded deeply for reading this book and implementing the suggested tips in your own life. But let us start at the beginning - who is the author, who is he known for, and so on, and then I will tell you why you should deliciously digest this book.

On Trustworthiness of Sources While Gathering Information About Software

Sun, 27 Aug 2017 16:34:17 +0000

Time and time I see people who follow all these random online tutorials and then when something does not work they become dazed and confused. “Why this does not work? But this tutorial shows that it should work” – I see similar questions occasionally in various forms on forums and IRC. I think people do not realize that there is some kind of hierarchy of trustworthiness of information sources. We should be conscious of that hierarchy when looking for information and remember it when we notice that something is not correct or up-to-date.

Why You Should Read Programming Books

Wed, 16 Aug 2017 05:31:17 +0000

Nowadays it seems like we are on an information highway and it is very hard to keep up with all the knowledge. Especially this is acute when considering how many websites there are on the Internet and how long it would take you to read and understand them all. However, there is a solution – books offer a way to get condensed information from the field experts and learn a lot of things. Many people think that this is only true for other fields except programming. But I think that is false. In software development, a lot of things are timeless as well and they do not change so often. Let me present this and other arguments in more detail, and try to convince you to pick up a programming book and read it.