Description

Optimize the decisions that define your code by exploring the common mistakes and intentional tradeoffs made by expert developers.

In Software Mistakes and Tradeoffs you will learn how to:

    Reason about your systems to make intuitive and better design decisions
    Understand consequences and how to balance tradeoffs
    Pick the right library for your problem
    Thoroughly analyze all of your service’s dependencies
    Understand delivery semantics and how they influence distributed architecture
    Design and execute performance tests to detect code hot paths and validate a system’s SLA
    Detect and optimize hot paths in your code to focus optimization efforts on root causes
    Decide on a suitable data model for date/time handling to avoid common (but subtle) mistakes
    Reason about compatibility and versioning to prevent unexpected problems for API clients
    Understand tight/loose coupling and how it influences coordination of work between teams
    Clarify requirements until they are precise, easily implemented, and easily tested
    Optimize your APIs for friendly user experience

Code performance versus simplicity. Delivery speed versus duplication. Flexibility versus maintainability—every decision you make in software engineering involves balancing tradeoffs. In Software Mistakes and Tradeoffs you’ll learn from costly mistakes that Tomasz Lelek and Jon Skeet have encountered over their impressive careers. You’ll explore real-world scenarios where poor understanding of tradeoffs lead to major problems down the road, so you can pre-empt your own mistakes with a more thoughtful approach to decision making.

Learn how code duplication impacts the coupling and evolution speed of your systems, and how simple-sounding requirements can have hidden nuances with respect to date and time information. Discover how to efficiently narrow your optimization scope according to 80/20 Pareto principles, and ensure consistency in your distributed systems. You’ll soon have built up the kind of knowledge base that only comes from years of experience.

About the Technology
Every step in a software project involves making tradeoffs. When you’re balancing speed, security, cost, delivery time, features, and more, reasonable design choices may prove problematic in production. The expert insights and relatable war stories in this book will help you make good choices as you design and build applications.

About the Book
Software Mistakes and Tradeoffs explores real-world scenarios where the wrong tradeoff decisions were made and illuminates what could have been done differently. In it, authors Tomasz Lelek and Jon Skeet share wisdom based on decades of software engineering experience, including some delightfully instructive mistakes. You’ll appreciate the specific tips and practical techniques that accompany each example, along with evergreen patterns that will change the way you approach your next projects.

What’s Inside

    How to reason about your software systematically
    How to pick tools, libraries, and frameworks
    How tight and loose coupling affect team coordination
    Requirements that are precise, easy to implement, and easy to test

Released May 2022