Push To Prod Or Die Trying: Lessons To Guide Your Sociotechnical Odyssey

NOTE: This is an early-release version of the book, including the first 2 chapters.  Additional chapters will be added as the final edits are finished, and the price will go up accordingly.  Current projections are to complete roughly 1 chapter per month and have the final version ready in early 2025.

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.

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 from where you are to where you’d like to be.