Unusual Book Ideas but most have been done

I met a retired person that was telling me she wrote a book immediately upon retiring. She knew the topic for her book. If I were to retire, I would like to write a book about some unusual topic. Here is a list of unusual book ideas. However, many books have been written about almost everything, including very unusual topics. Hence, my list includes many paranormal topics, hoping to find something new for whenever it is time for me to retire.

Book Topic	Book authors who already wrote it.
Someone real that got away with murder	Peter Lance
What really happened in the move Exorcist?	Troy Taylor
Spontaneous Human Combustion	Larry Arnold
Dreams	Craig Webb

A-Sha noodles with broccoli and carrots

Ingredients:

• 1 cup shredded cheddar cheese
• 5 broccoli florets
• 5 baby carrots, cut in pieces 1.5cm long
• Noodle (Mandarin-style) package such as the A-Sha dry-noodles 3.5 oz from Costco
• 1/2 Tbsp (regular preferred) breadcrumbs
• 2 and 1/2 Tbsp butter

Sauce: mix 3 Tbsp of the cheese, milk, and 2 Tbsp of the butter in a large bowl. Microwave it for 1 minute. Mix it well. Keep it in the microwave.

Add the carrots, 1/2 Tbsp butter, and the broccoli in a pot with 2 cups of water. Bring to a boil and cook for 10 minutes.

Cook noodles according to package directions (such as put to boiling water for 6 minutes), close lid and put it aside.

When all the previous steps are completed, reheat the sauce another 30 seconds in the microwave (or 1 minute if it has cool down). Put the noodle (no water) into the sauce bowl. Mix. Put carrots + broccoli into the sauce bowl. Mix. Sprinkle the remaining cheese on top. Sprinkle the bread crumbs on top.

Books list – Software Engineering

Copy of some of the books listed in https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/holiday-tech-book-recommendations/ (that I’m interested in)

Software engineering careers

• The Missing README: a guide for new software engineers
• Staff Engineer by Will Larson
• Building a Career in Software by Daniel Heller
• The Effective Engineer by Edmond Lau
• The Pragmatic Programmer by David Thomas, Andrew Hunt
• The Software Craftsman by Sandro Mancuso
• The Passionate Programmer by Chad Fowler
• Communication for Engineers by Chris Laffra

Software engineering

• A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout
• Designing Data Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann
• Software Engineering at Google by Titus Winters
• Understanding Distributed Systems by Roberto Vitillo
• Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software
• The Programmer’s Brain by Felienne Hermans
• Seriously Good Software by Marco Faella
• Refactoring by Martin Fowler
• The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander
• Modern Software Engineering by David Farley
• Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows
• Good Code, Bad Code by Tom Long
• Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones) by Marianne Belotti
• Implementing Service Level Objectives by Alex Hidalgo
• The Architecture of Open Source Applications by Amy Brown & Greg Wilson
• Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Pretzold
• Dependency Injection Principles, Practices and Patterns by Mark Seemann & Steven van Deursen

Best ingredients proportion for home made Pizza

• 6.5 oz. of pasta sauce (about 1/2 of a 1 lb pasta sauce can)
• 1 and 3/4 lb. shredded mozzarella chese
• 6 oz. pack of sliced pepperonis
• For the dough, make your own from scratch, make your own using a bread machine, or buy from the store (in order of preference).

Preheat the oven to 420F.

Do that trick of taking about two dozens of pepperonis, then cut them into small squares (about 4 x 4 mm. squares). Then mix them with the pasta sauce.

Add the pasta sauce first. Then add the cheese. Lastly, all the remaining pepperonis.

Cook for 18 to 20 minutes. If using a pizza stone, then it should be in the oven before preheating the oven, and the cooking time will be less, 16 to 18 minutes.

Store pizza leftovers in the fridge using 1 gallon plastic sealable bags.

Pepperoni Pizza

Why is GitOps so cool?!

• It is declarative (in the same manner as K8s is declarative)
• A git repo is the source of truth, and it automatically keeps track of the history of what changed
• Ability to do rollbacks to a known version of the system and doing so only using git
• Move away from “tickets” such as software engineer requesting a DevOps engineer (via ticket) to deploy code
• Possibility of deploying way more frequently, directly done by software engineers
• Clear division of CI. That is, CI gets the artifacts ready, and the tests verified to pass. Then GitOps takes care of CD

Key focus of an engineering manager

As an engineering manager, the following are key focus areas.

• Define coding guidelines
• Enforce settings in code repos, such as minimum of reviewers in pull requests, and successful build before merge.
• Clearly identify backup person when going out in PTO. Anticipate what the backup person will pay attention to based on upcoming calendar/commitments.