Tell Me More: A guide to system design and engineering leadership pdf baixar

The two most useful words in system design are "tell me more".

Every system that fails in production was approved in a room. Somebody presented a design, somebody nodded, and nobody asked the question that would have found the hole. Tell Me More is about that question: how to ask it, in what order, of whom, and what to do with the answer, from the strategy at the top of the company to the invoice at the end of the month.

Drawing on more than twenty years of building and running systems in UK financial services and other regulated industries, Alok Kulkarni sets out a way of understanding any system as a conversation that keeps going down and back up: business strategy, the capabilities it needs, the systems that provide them, the components inside, and the money that pays for all of it. The spine of the book is a one-page canvas built on six questions any journalist knows, who, what, when, where, why and how, and the two that separate designs that work from designs that merely get funded: how much? and what if?

Written for three readers who are usually kept apart, the book gives each of them the same page. Engineers, from their first year to staff and principal roles, get the technical depth they came for and discover that most of the hard questions are not technical. Engineering leaders, from first-line manager to CTO, get a way of asking about systems they no longer have time to know in detail. And the people on the other side of the table, in product, finance, risk, operations and compliance, get a plain-English layer in every chapter and the questions they are entitled to ask.

Inside:

• The Tell Me More canvas, the ladder from strategy to cost, and how to make a decision you can defend a year later

• Front to back: front doors, APIs, integration and where it leaks, service boundaries, data, platform and the road to production

• Three in the morning: identity, security by design, resilience and impact tolerances, performance, observability, privacy and evidence

• Follow the money: cost as a design input, unit economics, and the patterns and traps behind the cloud bill

• Six complete walkthroughs: instant payments, a retailer's peak day, a shared health record, a logistics event storm, a multi-tenant platform, and a banking assistant that can act

• The people who design systems: keeping technical depth as a leader, the staff engineer's craft, growing engineers who can design, the road from head of engineering to CTO, and how to run a design review that improves both the design and the people in it

Thirty-one chapters, more than a hundred diagrams drawn in one consistent visual language, and stories from the field throughout: the payment resent by a helpful library, the eleven minutes that cost a retailer its evening, the consent recorded in three places and honoured in one, the estate whose bill could not be traced to a strategy. Every chapter ends with what to take away and with the questions an engineer, a leader and a business partner should each be asking; every part ends with a one-page recap; and the appendices supply a printable canvas, a bank of forty review questions by layer and by role, and a glossary that says every technical word plainly.

Tell Me More is not an interview cram guide and not a vendor manual. It is the book to hand to a graduate before their first design review, to a new CTO before their first budget round, and to a finance director who has been told, once too often, that it's technical.