The Finishing Stretch...

Sam Newman

— 3 min read
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3 toy robots standing in a line
Rog01 https://www.flickr.com/photos/maitreyoda/7856293086/ CC BY-SA 2.0

A post from me is long overdue, but fear not - whilst I haven’t been spending time writing posts for this mailing list, I have been spending time working on the book! The finishing line is very much in sight. I’ll give a brief update on where I am with that, but expect more details as the planned September release date gets closer.

Book Progress

A lot of new stuff has arrived in early access. I rewrote chapter 1, and chapters 3-11 are also uploaded. All of these chapters have had a light editorial pass and at least one of my lovely technical reviewers has taken a look, but there could still be spelling mistakes and formatting issues. Given that we are so close to the book entering the production process, my main concern is picking up any factual errors. So if you have a chance to take a look and spot anything that is wrong, then please let me know by emailing contact@samnewman.io!

Updated Table Of Contents

Whilst the purpose of the book hasn’t changed, the structure has shifted quite a bit since the beginning. So I thought it would be nice to share a brief overview of the final table of contents.

  1. What Is Resiliency
  2. Fundamentals Of Observability
  3. Timeouts
  4. Retries And Idempotency
  5. Thundering Herds
  6. Rate Limiting
  7. Resiliency And AI
  8. Handling Machine Failure
  9. Message Brokers
  10. Disaster Recovery
  11. Progressive Collapse
  12. Understanding Tradeoff Using Formal Theorems
  13. Sociotechnical Systems
  14. Incident Management And Post Incident Review
  15. Constant Learning

The book will also come with a pattern list, bibliography and glossary too. In the next couple of weeks I’ll send out some pre-order links, and I hope to also even have a discount to share with you all…

Upcoming Events

The first half of this year was quite quiet for me, on purpose, as I wanted to focus on finishing the book. But in the second half of the year I’ll be on the road quite a bit more, which also means there are a small number of in-person workshops coming up for those of you interested:

I still have one or two events to confirm, so I’ll be sure to keep this list updated in the coming months.

Posts & Videos Elsewhere

I have also written a couple of articles recently over on LinkedIn, one of which will give you an insight as to what I am focusing on next. In the future, articles like this will appear on my mailing list and website first. But if you missed them over on the corporate hellscape social network that is LinkedIn, then here are some direct links:

  • My take on what appears to have happened when PocketOS's production database got eaten by and apologetic Claude Code.
  • Cobots, Dark Factories and the Future. This is where I try and work out whether or not we should just give code to our AI overlords, what concepts we can make use of from industrial automation and robotics more generally, and why modules are still great. I'm doing a few talks on this concept this year, so expect more on this soon.

I've also been creating some videos for the Modern Software Engineering channel, here are a few recent highlights:

  • A monologue where I go into detail on the PocketOS deletion and what we can learn from it
  • Dave Farley and I discuss Quantum computing. I know just enough about this topic to be dangerous, luckily Dave knows more than I do!
  • A perennial topic, but I explain why aiming for 100% code coverage is likely a mistake
  • A snipped from another discussion with Dave, this time on the golden rules of distributed systems, something I cover in depth in the new book

Next time I'll have a more accurate release date on the book, and hopefully some discount codes and pre-order links to share!

Sam

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