Episode · The Pragmatic Engineer · 2026-06-17
Gergely Orosz & Robert Erez: books mentioned on The Pragmatic Engineer
CI/CD with Robert Erez
Brought to You By: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.
Robert Erez recommended The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim and others, Radical Candor by Kim Malone Scott, and Diaspora by Greg Egan.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
-
The Phoenix Project
The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford is a business novel that uses a fictionalized narrative about an IT turnaround to illustrate DevOps principles and the importance of operational efficiency in software development.
Recommended“Phoenix Project is still for me a good one. This is one By Gene Kim, yeah. Yeah, and um I I can see uh you know, go you kind of remember that we got that in in in Skype.”
Where to get it
-
Radical Candor
Radical Candor by Kim Malone Scott is a management guide that teaches leaders how to care personally while challenging directly.
Recommended“The other one um from a more um I guess organizational and communication side of things, um Radical Candor by Kim Scott. How to you communicate more efficiently and with more compassion with um your peers and other people around you.”
Where to get it
-
Diaspora
Diaspora by Greg Egan is a seminal hard science fiction novel that explores the far-future evolution of human consciousness in digital and post-biological forms.
Recommended“From the the more fun side, basically anything by Greg Egan. He's an Australian sci-fi author. He writes some pretty crazy and mind-bending hard hard sci-fi. So, if you're really into that, I'd say read like Diaspora or Schismatrix.”
Where to get it
