Kill It with Fire
by Marianne Bellotti · first published 2021
91% recommend9% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Practical guide to maintaining and modernizing aging software systems, covering team dynamics, corporate politics and the technical side; useful for engineers and managers facing legacy code and replacement decisions.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Kill It with Fire chronicles the challenges of dealing with aging computer systems, along with sound modernization strategies. How to survive a legacy apocalypse “Kill it with fire,” the typical first reaction to a legacy system falling into obsolescence, is a knee-jerk approach that often burns through tons of money and time only to result in a less efficient solution. This book offers a far more forgiving modernization framework, laying out smart value-add strategies and proven techniques that work equally well for ancient systems and brand-new ones. Renowned for restoring some of
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I'm currently reading Marianne Bellotti's Kill It With Fire, which is about upgrading and maintaining legacy projects. It's more about meta-software-architecture (how to think about choosing and replacing architectures) than about software architecture itself.…
on “A curated list of books on Software Architecture” ↗Kill It With Fire by Marianne Bellotti is pretty much exactly about that, and is a great read.
on “Tech debt is not a burden, it's a strategic lever for success” ↗…software than a full rewrite. The dangers of full rewrites have been documented. Joel Spolsky and Stack Overflow described them as “the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make.” - Kill It with Fire - Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones) by Marianne Bellotti
on “Ask HN: How would you refactor a big project in 2023?” ↗The article quotes Marianne Bellotti quite a bit, and I recommend her newish book "Kill It With Fire"
on “An Apology to COBOL: Maybe Old Technology Isn’t the Real Problem” ↗For more on sunsetting or replacing legacy systems, check out Marianne Bellotti’s "Kill It With Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones)". Here's a review of the book: https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/kill-it-fire
on “A few ops lessons we all learn the hard way (2020)” ↗Definitely get a copy of Working Effectively With Legacy Code, by Michael C. Feathers. Indispensable. Second, and more aimed at the project/product management level is Kill It With Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones) from Marianne Bellotti. Older, but still worth a look in some cases, is Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns, 2008, by Demeyer, Ducasse,…
on “Ask HN: What are your favorite resources for modernizing legacy systems?” ↗Kill it with Fire, by Marianne Bellotti is an excellent resource on this question. She addresses the team dynamics, corporate politics and technical side of modernizing legacy systems. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/667571/kill-it-with...
on “Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?” ↗It’s not academic research, but I recommend Marianne Bellotti's "Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones)" about modernization of legacy software systems and managing the teams maintaining these systems. The author worked at the United States Digital…
on “Ask HN: Is there some academic research on software fragility?” ↗Good article. I highly recommend the book "Kill it with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (And Future Proof Modern Ones)" by Marianne Bellotti if you've ever had to deal with these kinds of legacy systems.
on “Development slowness in big and legacy applications” ↗I like to recommend "Kill It With Fire" by Marianne Bellotti. It is full of insights far beyond managing legacy systems (as the subtitle would have you believe) and does a great job of analyzing the technology and the people/organizations…
on “Ask HN: Good books on philosophy of engineering?” ↗On this subject, I recommend Marianne Bellotti‘s “Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones)”. She has managed the maintenance and modernization of large legacy systems at the United States Digital Service. https://nostarch.com/kill-it-fire
on “Long Term Software Development” ↗fwiw, Kleppmann sold his start up to LinkedIn and worked there on Kafka before writing DDIA! Marianne Bellotti's Kill It with Fire is a quick but good read
on “Laws of Software Engineering” ↗I highly recommend the book "Kill It with Fire" by Marianne Bellotti
on “The Business Impact of Code Quality” ↗So CS has some special need for academic cross-pollination that math and engineering don't share. If so, I'm shocked. Bellotti asserted this several times without anything to substantiate the claim. Kill It with Fire was on my reading list. I think I want to read more reviews now.
on “Computer science is a liberal arts degree” ↗Marianne Bellotti's new book, *Kill it with Fire" has an entire chapter, titled "Time is a Flat Circle", devoted to this sort of institutional amnesia.
on “A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate [pdf]” ↗