PUSH TO PROD OR DIE TRYING

Learn how to:

Build high-volume systems.

Thrive through sociotechnical challenges.

Survive gruesome production incidents.

🔥 early release now available at:

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Push to Prod

Shortcuts

Overview
Chapters and Lessons
Sample Diagrams
Other Info

Overview

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 at Netflix, Twitter, and other companies.

Split into 50 lessons across 8 chapters, you’ll learn about technical topics such as:

HTTP traffic shaping.
Multi-region failover.
Building data pipelines and tooling for 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.
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. This book is a resource to guide you across the terrain.

Chapters and Lessons (so far)

Chapter 1 — Somewhere Between Bold and Reckless: Routing API Traffic to Europe

Lesson 1.1: Hiring is Everything
Lesson 1.2: Boldness is a Virtue
Lesson 1.3: When Overwhelmed, Make a List of Questions
Lesson 1.4: The More You Optimize, The Weirder Things Get
Lesson 1.5: We're All Imposters
Lesson 1.6: Hyperfocus When Necessary
Lesson 1.7: Get Used to Repeating Yourself
Lesson 1.8: Real Engineers Build Real Things

Chapter 2 — This Party Is Too Crowded: Building an Edge Proxy from Ground Zero

Lesson 2.1: Avoid People Who Dump Work On You
Lesson 2.2: Focus on Opportunities, Not Problems
Lesson 2.3: A Big Launch Feels Like a Fight to the Death
Lesson 2.4: Build Things That Enable Building Things
Lesson 2.5: Enabling Good Is More Powerful Than Preventing Bad
Lesson 2.6: Give Yourself An Identity Before Others Do It For You
Lesson 2.7: Work Flows Along the Easiest Path

Chapter 3 — Investigating Infinity: Building Distributed Traffic Search

stay tuned... 👀

Sample Graphs and Diagrams

(if you're into that sort of thing)