[Oldletter #7] Products are made of people, a tech documentation framework and the cloud books you need on your shelf

Every Friday, I’m sharing a short list of evergreen articles/resources broadly related to software engineering that wouldn’t typically get shared in most tech newsletters or social media feeds.

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This week’s links

• Products are made of people (2020) by Luca Ingianni. In this short piece, my friend and DevOps consultant Luca makes a few crucial points that engineering leaders often under-appreciate:

  Software is just a small part of the product. The product also comprises things like UX, or documentation, or processes – or people! Any non-trivial system (i.e., product) will be used by people, operated by people, maintained by people. People are part of the system.

  …if you make software quality about testing, you’re doing too little too late. The fight for good quality begins way earlier, and it ends after what might be called the “QA stage” of traditional software organisations.

• Diátaxis Framework for authoring technical documentation by Daniele Procida. A framework for understanding who your audience is to help write better technical documentation. It proposes four modes of documentation: learning-oriented tutorials, task-oriented how-to guides, understanding-oriented explanations and information-oriented references.
• The Cloud books you need on your shelf by the Serverless Edge team. A great curation of software engineering books with a cloud/DevOps slant. The recommendations have publish dates as early as 2013, so a lot of time-tested resources in here. I’ve added a few of these to my own reading backlog.

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Submitting your recommendations

If you’d like to share an evergreen article/book which has significantly influenced your thinking or practice around software delivery, please email it through to me and I’ll add it to my backlog for sharing in future editions.

Have a great weekend!

— Paul

P.S. There will be no email from me on Monday due to the Easter holidays 🐣