Book Review: "Kill It With Fire" by Marianne Bellotti

Kill It with Fire: Manage aging computer systems (and future proof modern ones)

This book has a lot of good advice and insight, that is unfortunately very relevant to some of the work I’m doing right now.

I liked the consideration of ‘momentum’ and how to maintain it to avoid the cycle of half-assed rewrites and migrations that are never quite finished.

There’s an anecdote about how one US government team, working on immigration application software was using ‘Refugees saved from ISIS’ as a metric. Surely that’s one of the most horrifying KPIs of all time.