Push to Prod or Die Trying
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Push to Prod or Die Trying

How To Build Scalable Sociotechnical Systems

About the Book

The world of software engineering is filled with challenges:

  • Choosing problems to solve. How do you decide whether a problem is worth solving, or which problem to solve among many?
  • Building for scale. How do you ensure that the systems you build can withstand the volume of traffic and data that they’ll encounter?
  • Launching things in production. How do you launch new things with tight timelines, minimal risk, and maximal impact?
  • Operating through chaos. How do you maximize uptime, comprehension, and sanity in an environment that relentlessly pushes you toward the opposite?
  • Optimizing personal goals and team interactions. How do you balance pursuing your personal goals with supporting your colleagues while also enforcing sensible boundaries?

In Push To Prod Or Die Trying, veteran engineer Matthew Hawthorne discusses these topics through the lens of Neurafilm, a fictional San Francisco Bay Area tech company inspired by his real-world experiences at NetflixTwitter, and other companies.

Split into 50 lessons across 8 chapters, you’ll learn about technical topics such as:

  • HTTP traffic shaping.
  • Multi-region failover.
  • Building data pipelines and tooling for AI/ML personalization models.

You’ll also get a window into the day-to-day grind of working for a big tech company during the boom years, including:

  • Dealing with overly ambitious colleagues.
  • Battling burnout and severe work/life imbalances.
  • Debugging an endless barrage of gruesome production incidents.

By the end of the book, you’ll have laughed, you’ll have cried, and you’ll have acquired a lengthy list of lessons and techniques to apply in your daily work.

A software career is a journey through highs and lows, with scenery that ranges from desolate to beautiful. This book is a resource to guide you across the terrain.

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  • Categories

    • Distributed Systems
    • Amazon Web Services
    • AWS
    • Testing
    • Personal Transformation
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About the Author

Matthew Hawthorne
Matthew Hawthorne

Matthew Hawthorne is an independent software engineer, consultant, and advisor.

His focus areas are distributed systems, AI/ML infrastructure, and pushing things into production.

He has previously worked at Twitter, Netflix, Comcast, and a handful of other companies.

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