PUSH TO PROD OR DIE TRYING
High-Scale Systems, Production Incidents, and Big Tech Chaos
Learn how to:
Build high-volume systems that actually work in production
Navigate sociotechnical challenges like a seasoned engineer
Survive gruesome incidents and emerge stronger
About the Author
Matthew Hawthorne has built and operated systems serving millions of users at Netflix, Twitter, and other companies.
Subscribe to his newsletter Push to Prod
Overview
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 Netflix, Twitter, and other companies.
Split into 50 lessons across 8 chapters, you'll learn about technical topics such as HTTP traffic shaping, multi-region failover, and building data pipelines and tooling for offline experimentation to support 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, and 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. Let this book be a resource to guide you across the terrain.
Chapters and Lessons
Chapter 1 — Somewhere Between Bold and Reckless: Routing API Traffic to Europe
- 1.1: Hiring is Everything
- 1.2: Boldness is a Virtue
- 1.3: When Overwhelmed, Make a List of Questions
- 1.4: The More You Optimize, The Weirder Things Get
- 1.5: We're All Imposters
- 1.6: Hyperfocus When Necessary
- 1.7: Get Used to Repeating Yourself
- 1.8: Real Engineers Build Real Things
Chapter 2 — This Party Is Too Crowded: Building an Edge Proxy from Ground Zero
- 2.1: Avoid People Who Dump Work On You
- 2.2: Focus on Opportunities, Not Problems
- 2.3: A Big Launch Feels Like a Fight to the Death
- 2.4: Build Things That Enable Building Things
- 2.5: Enabling Good Is More Powerful Than Preventing Bad
- 2.6: Give Yourself An Identity Before Others Do It For You
- 2.7: Work Flows Along the Easiest Path
Chapter 3 — Investigating Infinity: Building Distributed Traffic Search
- 3.1: Accept Operational Chaos Into Your Heart
- 3.2: Better Architecture, Better Problems
- 3.3: Defend Your Time As If Your Life Depends On It
- 3.4: Some Social Problems Require Technical Solutions
- 3.5: Production is the Only Source of Truth
- 3.6: Your Incidents Should Get Weirder
- 3.7: Building or Buying is a Spiritual Decision
Sample Diagrams
(if you're into that sort of thing)
Additional Information
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