---
title: "Books we've read"
source: 18F Guides
source_url: https://github.com/18F/guides
licence: CC0-1.0
domain: engineering
subdomain: 18f-guides
date_added: 2026-04-25
---

Engineers at 18F like to read! Here are a few books and other publications that folks have mentioned that they have read in #dev and elsewhere.

- *Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations* by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim
- *Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error* by Kathryn Schulz
- *Debugging Teams: Better Productivity through Collaboration* by Brian W. Fitzpatrick
- *The Design of Everyday Things* by Don Norman
- *Domain-Driven Design Distilled* by Vaughn Vernon
- *Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software* by Eric Evans
- *The Effective Engineer* by Edmond Lau and Bret Taylor
- *Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your User Stories* by Gojko Adzic and David Evans
- *The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'* by Sidney Dekker
- *Inviting Disaster: Lessons From the Edge of Technology* by James R. Chiles
- *It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work* by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
- *Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones)* by Marianne Bellotti
- *The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change* by Camille Fournier
- *Monolith to Microservices: Evolutionary Patterns to Transform Your Monolith* by Sam Newman
- *The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering* by  Frederick Brooks Jr.
- *[Prototyping for tiny fingers](http://fpl.cs.depaul.edu/jriely/360/extras/prototyping-for-tiny-fingers.pdf)* by Marc Rettig
- *[Reflections on Trusting Trust ](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf)* by Ken Thompson
- *[Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles
and Ship Work that Matters](https://basecamp.com/shapeup/webbook)* by Ryan Singer
- *[Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems](https://sre.google/sre-book/table-of-contents/)* by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Richard Murphy
- *Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud* by Brendan Gregg
- *Threat Modeling: Designing for Security* by Adam Shostack
- *[Twenty Ways to Split Stories](https://xp123.com/articles/twenty-ways-to-split-stories/)* by Bill Wake
- *A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative* by Roger von Oech
- *[You Reap What You Code](https://ferd.ca/you-reap-what-you-code.html)* by Fred Hebert
