Harness the Power of Coding
Many of my colleagues who have moved from a system administrator position to an SRE/DevOps engineer role have one element in common: they need to refine their coding skills. With the correct resources and guidance, they can develop their coding abilities, becoming more proficient and successful in their new role.
Google’s book outlines the design of their SRE team, emphasizing that they have crafted their personnel structure to ensure their success.
“The result of our approach to hiring for SRE is that we end up with a team of people who (a) will quickly become bored by performing tasks by hand, and (b) have the skill set necessary to write software to replace their previously manual work, even when the solution is complicated.” [Site Reliability Engineering, 2016, p. 5]
In order to be an effective SRE, it is essential to have the ability to automate tasks and at some point if the automation to be able to write code. Writing clean, maintainable, understandable, and tested code is worth the effort of practicing and studying coding techniques.
Uncle Bob Martin’s “Clean Code” provides the absolute basics of writing clean code, but his series called “Clean Coders” provides a fun and interactive approach to learning these concepts. The combination of the book and some practice can help you write code that is easier to understand and maintain. (The Clean Coders is a bit silly, but it has an explanation. It is what it is because otherwise, you would sleep in 5 minutes because of the technical details.)
My second favorite book is “Headfirst Design Patterns,” as it makes the GOF design patterns more understandable. It’s a great resource to learn and differentiate between the various patterns. Reading the book is beneficial, as it helps you convert complex systems into code more easily while providing insight into the underlying patterns that many people think in. : Not only is this book useful for coding, but the patterns described can be applied to other fields as well; the observer pattern is a great example. In the long run, this book will provide a lot of benefits.
And don’t forget to take the Boy Scout Rule from “The Clean Coder” into account.
“Always check in a module cleaner than you checked it out.” [The Clean Coder,2011, p.15]
All in all,
These are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on my coding skills so far. However, I am happy to share more book recommendations in the future. Practicing is also essential for honing coding skills since it can be compared to forming habits and memorizing physical movements — after enough repetition, you won’t need to think about it anymore and will just do it.
