Episode · The Pragmatic Engineer · 2025-04-23
Books mentioned on Building Reddit’s iOS and Android app
Supported by Our Partners • Graphite — The AI developer productivity platform. • Sentry — Error and performance monitoring for developers.
Mentioned: Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren and others, The C Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan and others, Tidy First? by Kent Beck, and Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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Accelerate
Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, PhD, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim is a research-backed guide that examines software delivery performance, organizational culture, and DevOps practices.
Discussed“It's in the accelerate book and I think about it a lot. Um it basically says that all cultures will eventually like settle into a pathological power oriented culture, a bureaucratic rule oriented culture or a generative performanceoriented culture.”
Where to get it
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The C Programming Language
The C Programming Language by Brian W.
Recommended“And then as closing what's a book that you would recommend and why I thought about this forever and I have to choose the KN&RC book um like I feel like it melted my brain a little bit when I really really understood that like object-oriented programing is like just C structures with function pointers inside of it.”
Where to get it
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Tidy First?
Tidy First? by Kent Beck is a software development book that explores the philosophy and practice of small, deliberate structural changes to codebases to improve maintainability before tackling larger feature implementations.
Recommended“So I decided my my recommendation right now is Kent Beck's Tidy First. We read it as a we read it as a team last year and had a whole multi-day conversation about how we could incorporate Yeah.”
Where to get it
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Project Hail Mary
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir is a science fiction novel about an astronaut tasked with saving humanity from an extinction-level threat.
Recommended“Um Project Hail Mary is my uh my fiction book recommendation. Fantastic. Couldn't put it down.”
Where to get it
Other mentions in this episode (1) — ad reads, self-promotion and passing references, never counted
“I also wrote a book titled Building Mobile Apps at Scale that contains more pointers on this topic.”