When you’re doing research and planning application development, it’s always useful to learn from the stories and experience of your peers. Your own experience and background are critical towards having good judgement and making good decisions, but it’s great to leverage the experience of other people who’ve been there as well. Here’s a selection of great reading resources that can help you, this blog not included. If you’re interested in subscribing to the blogs mentioned, there’s also a Google Reader bundle or RSS feed that you can use to subscribe at the bottom of that section.

Blogs To Read About DevOps, performance, and scalability:

1) Dev2Ops (Updated Every 1-2 Weeks) - As the name would suggest, Dev2Ops covers everything you might want to know on this subject, and features a lot of video as well. Much of their material is also positioned for people in devops roles in larger organizations, and how to manage release and control systems in large organizations which have different kinds of problems than close, small teams.

2) Atlassian (Updated 1-2x a week) - Atlassian’s excellent blog covers much of the infrastructure that teams need to stay in communication and on top of their business.

3) High Scalability (Updated 2-3x a week) - One of the best blogs covering topics around DevOps, High Scalability includes everything in their material from new ideas and thought leadership to practical examples and news coverage of everything happening in the world of performance and scalability.

4) MySQL Performance Blog (Updated 2-3x a week) - WIth a name like this, it’s hard to go wrong – You can’t really afford to skip this site at all if you’re responsible at all for database performance.

5) Code as Craft (Updated 3-5x a month) - By the Etsy team, Code as Craft describes the engineering and operations challenges and discoveries they’ve found at scale.

You can subscribe to all of these blogs (and our own) with one click now via our Google Reader Bundle! If you’re not a Google Reader user, OPML and RSS/Atom versions of the Bundle are also available so that you can use your favorite application.

Books! Here’s some great reading, whether you enjoy them digital or pulp, during your commute or at the gym, and anywhere in-between:

1) Web Operations: Keep The Data On Time by John Allspaw & Jesse Robbins. This is actually my current reading material and could almost be required reading material for anyone who wants to make a career in the development and operations world: John Allspaw and Jesse Robbins (with other select guest writers) break down some great engineering problems and stories about developing and scaling applications with a variety of tactics and issues at hand. If you only have the time or patience to read one book, this is the way to go.

2) Continuous Integration by Paul M Duvall, Steve Matyas, and Andrew Glover. The reasons why and benefits of CI are the subject of many other well-written blog posts (One well known example is here), and this is a great book on the topic with examples and details on how to get the most out of it for your organization.

3) The Art of Capacity Planning by John Allspaw. We’ve already talked about John above – This is one of his other books. John’s incredible experience in infrastructure and capacity planning includes notable roles at Friendster, Yahoo/Flickr, and Etsy.

4) Lean IT by Steven C Bell and Michael Orzen. “Lean” is a phrase that’s often used and and even more often misused, and so resources that help appreciate the value of what lean strategies are and aren’t are very useful. If effectiveness and efficiency are problems for your group, adapting more of the lean strategies will probably benefit you. Even if your organization is already successful with lean strategies, it’s always useful to see examples and case studies of

5) Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business by David Anderson and Donald Reinertsen. If you’re part of a team and struggling as a group to manage and make progress on a number of projects simultaneously, you probably do work in an IT or DevOps organizing. They’re complicated and constantly full of different challenges at different levels, but there are resources available that can help you better plan and understand the work that you have to do.

6) This is a bonus one since it’s not directly about DevOps, but it is a critical book about management and business by one of the great legends of the topic. Management Challenges for the 21st Century by Peter Drucker is a critical book for anyone responsible for business goals and operational success. There’s not much more that you can say about it than that. 

What other blogs or books do you enjoy reading about web development and performance? What have you learned from? Let us know in the comments.

(Photo Credit: Talltim)