Julius Robert

Leaders Eat Last

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On my eReader it has around 60+ pages for notes and bibliography. A lot of research went into this one. Well written, inspiring, and might even affect my approach to some problems. Worth a read!

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Only the Paranoid Survive

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Architecture Patterns with Python: Enabling Test-Driven Development, Domain-Driven Design, and Event-Driven Microservices

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Nothing new if you’ve read some of the other books on software architecture you can find here. But it’s very approachable. Using Python as an example language gives you all the principles without having to squint through the more verbose ones like C# or Java.

The foundations the book builds upon are strong, and it gives you tools to structure your application from whatever situation you’re in into something maintainable. However, the authors skip over some very complicated topics like the difficulties of distributed systems. The good thing is that they are explicit about this, and tell you where to read about it.

I enjoy brownfield development much more than greenfield. The constraints and limitations of the specific situation you’re in make it much more interesting and difficult. Developers often call for rewrites when an application becomes unwieldy, under the guise that it’s going to be “better” if it can be designed from the ground up using best-practice principles. This is not the case.

A rewrite is almost never going to solve these problems. I’ve seen it happen a few times. Unless you’re forced to learn how to turn an unmanageable mess into something changeable, you’re most likely going to make the same mistakes again. You’ll end up where you started but perhaps in an even worse position than before. Meanwhile your clients aren’t getting the features they need.

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Human cruelty always seems to surprise me whenever I encounter it. “Surely people cannot be this cruel,” I ask myself, and I’m always proven wrong.

The famous quote from George Carlin might just have to be extended to include cruelty alongside stupidity in humans. However, humans can also be infinitely kind. I suppose we can’t have one without the other…

Why Nature Wants Us to Be Fat

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Interesting stuff, but a lot of the science is extrapolated from studies made with mice.

The Hacking of the American Mind

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Nothing new here. Social Media, Food, and Entertainment industries want your attention, money, health and free time. As much as they can get it. It’s up to you to stop them.

Fat Chance: The Hidden Truth about Sugar, Obesity, and Disease

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This one hit real close to home. I literally grew up in a candy store. From when I was 4 years old, until around 17. It shaped my relationship to food and nutrition in the worst possible way.

Revenge of the TippingPoint: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

Fri, 30 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Read during two days.

Tipping points aren’t always positive. Small, seemingly isolated actions can snowball into widespread consequences—often unintended(hopefully), and sometimes harmful.

Modern Software Engineering: Doing What Works to Build Better Software Faster

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Nudge introduces the term Choice Architect—the people who design the options we’re presented with, multiple times a day. Sometimes it’s innocent and well-meaning, like nudging a child to eat more vegetables by putting them first on the menu. But the same mechanisms can be used in reverse: making unhealthy or processed food more attractive.

Are we free to make our own choices? Or are we just choosing the path of least resistance, guided by invisible hands? We’re not always rational; in fact, we reliably make bad, irrational decisions about important things. You might think you’re too smart to be tricked by clever design—but the data says otherwise. We consistently make poor choices, even when we should know better.

That’s why we need to pay close attention to the choice architects around us—their incentives matter. Would tobacco companies warn you about cancer if not required to by law? Would financial institutions make their fees understandable and visible if they didn’t have to?

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman taught me how small design choices can have huge effects. A door with a metal plate signals push. A handle signals pull. These aren’t just usability tweaks—they’re behavioral nudges. Designers are choice architects.

But there’s a darker side too: sludge. If nudges help people make better choices, sludge is the deliberate use of friction to slow them down, confuse them, or trap them. It’s when canceling a subscription takes ten clicks on ten different web pages that are only available for 5 minutes every day when there’s a full moon. In january… Or it’s when key information is buried in fine print. Sludge isn’t just annoying—it’s harmful, and is often designed that way on purpose.

Azure Infrastructure as Code With ARM templates and Bicep

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Skip this one unless you’re planning to or already doing things with Azure. The ARM and Bicep sections provide you with important information about how to think about your IaC (Infrastructure as Code). This book will give you the rundown on how Microsoft themselves want you to think about and work with Azure. Structuring your resources (aka Resources, Providers etc.), your Tenant, and how to make sure you’re working effectively with the tools at your disposal.

If I was about to place both my infrastructure and software stack in Azure, I’d very much like to structure it in a way that follows Microsoft’s thought-process and guidelines. It will reduce the chance of having to make difficult changes when some assumption of yours suddenly disappears.

I can also highly recommend that you read through the MSDN - Azure site if you’re serious about doing down this road.

Domain Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Oh boy, this book was not easy to get through. I was often reflecting over times in my career when the insights in this book could have saved me (and my colleagues) from headaches.

It leans more toward object-oriented thinking than I’m entirely comfortable with, but that’s easy enough to skip or reinterpret into something more useful (functional programming—yes, I’m biased).

I highly recommend this book to almost anyone working in IT. The tools and insights it provides are valuable, and will help you tackle the complexities of your own software system. One important part is the concept of a ubiquitous language—a shared vocabulary agreed upon and used consistently by everyone working on a system or a distinct part of it.

Thinking In Systems

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I never thought to ask for a formal way to describe what I see in society. The patterns that emerge when observing the actions and consequences of the people around me or in the media have always been visible, but just slightly out of reach of reasoning about in any meaningful way. This is now possible. The tools and language you learn from this book will help to make sense of the decisions made by others.

A water faucet filling a bucket with a hole in the bottom is a simple system. The economy that drives a country like Sweden is unfahtomably complex. The world is composed of these systems that in turn make up other systems, each with their own feedback loops, stocks, flows, and delays. This book doesn’t just explain these principles; it provides a structured way to think about them, making the invisible structures behind everyday events more tangible.

Highly recommended for any citizen of a country.

Software Architecture: The Hard Parts

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Again, there are no silver bullets. It’s all about managing and balancing trade-offs. Find them, reason about them, and put them into the context of your situation/problem. Figure out which of them are important to the people around you. Your PO for example likely has a different idea about what’s important compared to your engineering colleagues.

Distributed software is hard. Arm yourself accordingly.

The Pragmatic Programmer: Your Journey to Mastery

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This one is somewhere between a 3 and a 4. As I read it today it’s more of a 3. 5+ years ago, it could easily have been a 5. I’ve realized much of what the book tries to teach, through trial and error, learning from others, and reading other books in the genre.

Chapter 8 (Before the Project) is a part I’ll be revisiting. It gave me a lot to think about regarding software requirements (and as they phrase it, needs), and how those are materialized. As well as how we, as developers, should approach a “requirement”.

Working Effectively With Legacy Code

Sun, 29 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

After this book you’ll have guiding light in the figurative tunnel of darknes that is a giant codebase with no tests, no architecture, no coherent design.

You’ll be able to poke and prod into whichever horrendous monolith you’ll encounter and walk out in at least a similar amount of pieces that you entered with.

Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

Sat, 13 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This book was released in 2004, and I started working as a software engineer about 10 years later. If I had read this book then, I wouldn’t have understood the impact that the practice of XP (Extreme Programming) could (and would) have on myself and the work I do. Doing things the “wrong” way—meaning less effective and more expensive—is, in my opinion, one of the best ways to understand the need and appreciate the benefits of doing it differently.

It’s not even specifically about software engineering either. XP has had big and positive effects on my personal life as well. Forming habits, measuring outcomes, and continuous improvement.

The book mentions the importance of having a community (around XP) that you engage in. A safe space where you share your thoughts and worries and get constructive feedback. This can be on the internet, meetups, or in the workplace. I was introduced to XP in the workplace which meant that I already had a community to engage with (even if it was just one other person). It helped immensely with understanding and putting XP to practice.

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

Sat, 29 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I have to admit, breathing isn’t something I’ve paid a lot of attention to, which seems kind of… normal? I recall being taught early on that the body takes care of itself. To just leave it alone and let it do its thing. I also just wrote it off as it seems like something that becomes important enough to pay attention to when you’re doing physical activities beyond the usual upkeep for a normal person, and that’s usually accompanied by a trained professional.

There isn’t a lot of science here, but the stories are fascinating. It’s free and easy to try the exercises. I’m going to try my best to adhere to the lessons in the book, and revisit this page in a while to see how it turns out.

Who knows, it might completely change the way I live my life. Though I wouldn’t hold my… Never mind.

Code That Fits in Your Head: Heuristics for Software Engineering

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It’s a well-written and a valuable resource. All IT organizations have their way of doing things, but the ideas here are applicable almost everywhere. Depending on your level of knowledge and work experience it might be hard to imagine the impact of having the tools presented at your disposal. I would simply suggest reading it again a year later.

Although I was already aware of many of the ideas I managed to leave some post-it notes scattered around the edges of the pages with little messages for myself later to look at randomly over the next months or so.

Author also has a great blog resource as well!

Turn the Ship Around

Sat, 25 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Short and mostly to the point.

Former Navy Captain David Marquet shares his approach to leadership that transformed his submarine crew from followers to leaders.

What kind of organization do you want to belong to?
What questions should you ask yourself to measure the well-being of your organization?
How do you detect deviations from the optimal path?

Tactical tools are provided to answer questions like these and to assess whether your organization creates leaders or is churning out followers.

It equips you with the insights to build a culture of empowerment and accountability, ensuring sustainable success and growth.

Functional Programming in C#

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 22:07:09 +0200

If you’re interested in functional programming I’d start skimming through Scott Wlaschins site F# For fun and profit, watch some of his videos on YouTube and, get a feel for the concepts. The site is primarily about F# but the concepts are language agnostic. It will be a bit harder to do some things in C# but that’s where this book comes in. Make sure to work through the exercises and check out the source code for both them and the examples.

Incorporating the techniques and patterns in your own code will start you off in thinking functionally. Be warned though, there might be some resistance. Thinking about code if you’re coming from the regular old imperative programming style will be very different.

Not the End of the world

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Author is heavily inspired by Hans Rosling and his style of presenting information. If you liked Factfulness, you’ll feel right at home.

Long story short, it’s not as bad as it seems. We’re on the right track. And while we’ve never practiced sustainability to the extent we do today, there’s still a lot more to be done.

Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems

Fri, 15 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’m just going to drop some random quotes from the book, they ought to entice you enough.

When both observability and testing are lacking on your legacy system, observability comes first. Tests tell you what won't fail; monitoring tells you what is failing.

When in doubt, default to panicking. It's more important that errors get noticed so that they can be resolved.

The important takeaway is working groups relax organizational boundaries while committees reinforce them

While reading this book I couldn’t help remember some of my bouts with modernizing. I wish I’d have read this first…

The Mythical Man-Month

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

There is no silver bullet. Project management is hard. This book helps a lot.

Domain Modeling Made Functional

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Even if you don’t work with F# or functional languages there are valuable lessons for any software developer. If you really want the code to be the documentation for your application, start here.

Thu, 18 May 2023 18:11:27 +0200

Who am I?

My name is Julius Robert. I’m a software engineer based in Stockholm, Sweden. I grew up in Västerås and spent most of my time playing video games and nerding around with technology. I also studied maths, hardware (embedded systems), and computer science. My career started when I moved to Stockholm in 2014 to work as an IT consultant.

What am I doing now?

Working with very talented people to scale up a system that is bursting at the seams.

Why did I make this site?

To have a place for my own content that I control
To experiment with new technologies, tools, and ways of working
To write more

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Thu, 18 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Prisoners of Geography: Ten maps that explain the world

Thu, 18 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Courage to Be Disliked

Sat, 01 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Fun read!

Designing Data-intensive Applications

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Why did I read this so late??

The Design of Everyday Things

Sat, 01 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Powerful concepts, useful for anyone building things for other people. Made me reevaluate the word design. It’s everywhere. Whatever you do has some design behind it. You design your code for the next reader, you design the app for the ease of use. Really think about what you’re building and how it looks from the users point of view, how will they use it? How will it go wrong? How do we help?

Behave: The Psychology of Humans at their best and worst

Thu, 18 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Should be mandatory reading for literally everyone who interacts with other humans. Even more so for the ones who decide the fate of others. You get a high level view and understanding of how the brain works. It gives you a different perspective when engaging with others.

Why We Sleep

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Neglecting sleep is one of my biggest regrets in life. I don’t do that any more.

How Asia Works

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I never paid much attention to the history of this part of the world. Didn’t finish this one but might pick it up again.

The Psychology of Money

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I think most people know a lot of what the author is trying to teach but it’s good to get a refresher.

Radical Candor

Mon, 01 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Author is a fascinating person with much to tell. Many mistakes but also a lot of success shape the lessons in the book.

Perhaps the lessons are self-evident after a while working as a manger. For me this book was a good jump-start into the fascinating intricacies of management.

High Output Management

Fri, 01 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Entertaining, educating and exciting! Great lessons. Worthy read for management types and engineers alike. As an engineer it’s good to know what to look for in a manager, as a manager it’s good to know what your engineers need.

Outliers

Sun, 01 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Very fun read! A look into how the greatest among us rose to their greatness. And it’s likely you’ll be surprised why.

Blink

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Ego Is The Enemy

Thu, 21 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Helps you get into a different mindset in your life. Focus on concrete things which only you can control.

The Goal

Fri, 10 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Combining education with a human story is a great way to teach. Must read for anyone in charge of or a part of an organization with processes (which should be basically everyone)…

Deep Work

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

If only I’d read this sooner… Today, it’s easier than ever to get distracted. Everyone is fighting for your attention. It’s the one thing you should be very greedy with.

Factfulness

Sat, 02 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Author Hans Rosling really has to be experienced in a live talk. This book is a close second.

Homo Deus

Sun, 01 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Interesting speculations. Youval is smart and has a lot of knowledge to back up his thoughts.

Countdown To Zero-Day: Stuxnet

Sun, 04 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Tells the story of Operation Olympic Games. The first official act of cyber warfare. Educating and entertaining. Learning about different small scale “attacks” on infrastructure around the world, and the shocking lack of security in software of mechanical systems, the ones enabling much of our current infrastructure, was eye opening.

The Subtle Art of not Giving a Fuck

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Yes!!

The Tipping Point

Tue, 01 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Big fan of Malcolm Gladwell. Many good lessons to be learned here.

Sapiens

Sat, 01 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

So much history, insight and education in a book so easy to read. Highly recommend if you’re interested in our collective history.

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

Mon, 30 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000