Efficiently building software. That’s what this book is about. It frames our work not (only) as craft, art, or magic, but also as an engineering discipline rooted in empiricism and iteration.

Principles like testability, observability, and incremental change form the foundation. The book emphasizes short iteration cycles, tight feedback loops, and comprehensive automated testing. These aren’t just good practices—they’re essential for scaling and sustaining modern systems.

The verdict is in: the book Accelerate (read it if you haven’t) did the work for us. The ideas here are proven to help companies build software better, faster, and cheaper.

A fantastic side effect is reducing cognitive load—on you, your team, and the many future versions of yourself who’ll have to revisit this code. Simplicity, clarity, and minimizing unnecessary coordination become first-class goals.

It’s interesting that other industries have already adopted the strategies in this book, even though it’s much more expensive for them to do so. While software engineering has its hard parts, we’re able to do more—and act with an agility unavailable to others.

Compared with building a bridge: once the concrete has hardened, you’re committed. In software, we can cut the bridge out, change a few things, and paste it back into reality! We can even paste it somewhere else just to see what happens! I assume bridge builders would love to be able to do that.