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5 must-read Platform Engineering books

We are clearly in the summer holiday season. How do I know? After sending last week’s newsletter on Backstage, I received over TWO THOUSAND out-of-office email replies. It was insane watching them pour in last week. It made it pretty hard to use my email Friday night. 

Beyond the craziness of that fact alone, it represents just how much platform engineering is growing. Long time readers will know I like to use the platform engineering community as a gauge for the growth in the wider industry - this newsletter alone is more than 10x bigger than this time last year. And shows no sign of stopping.

But since it is summer season, and so many of you are on holiday - let’s embrace the season with a push to read the crucial texts of platform engineering this year.

1. Platform Strategy - Gregor Hohpe: Released just a few months ago, I think this is already a must read. Gregor’s PlatformCon talks are some of the best platform engineering content out there (and have been viewed over 30,000 times) and this book goes much much further
2. Team Topologies - Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais: A very unsurprising addition to this list, Team Topologies is a foundational text of platform engineering, establishing and expanding on many of the major concepts of the discipline, most crucially Platform as a Product.
3. Accelerate - Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim: If you haven’t read this software engineering classic yet, you need to. Reading it and lessons through the lens of a platform engineer does a great job of demonstrating why platform engineering is so impactful.
4. Remote Team Interactions Workbook - Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais: With the chances of all your platform stakeholders being in the same buildin (let alone the same continent) being basically zero, this less-known book by Matthew and Manuel is a great and super helpful read.
5. DevOps Benchmarking Study 2023 - Me (with help): Okay, bit cheeky to add this here (and pretty presumptuous). But last week I read this whitepaper I worked on in 2023, and I think there are few things that lay out as clearly the reason why DevOps is failing, and platform engineering is taking over. And at 55 pages it could pass for a novella, right?

If that isn’t enough, or if you’ve read these already - these are the foundational texts after all. There is currently over 300+ hours of PlatformCon content on the platform engineering Youtube channel. 

And 100s of pages of content on the platform engineering blog.

I remember 4 years ago when there was almost nothing. And every new thing that came out was devoured by everyone in days. It’s incredible how far we’ve come.