Kill It With Fire

“A valuable addition to the literature on the topic, particularly for managers and senior contributors … Kill it With Fire is a useful and highly readable guide to solving these problems by leveraging the organization—the system around the system.”—Laura Nolan, USENIX“Modernizing legacy systems is an increasingly common task for software developers. Kill It with Fire guides you through the ins and outs of these endeavors in an engaging way, diving into both the technical and social aspects that are crucial to making you successful when undertaking modernization projects.” –Damian Schenkelman, Principal Engineer, Auth0“Kill It With Fire is incredibly well timed. For those alarmed by the provocative title, rest assured the only thing Bellotti advocates torching is the notion of torching itself. And while the book is written for technical leadership, her wisdom is something many nontechnical government leaders need to hear right now, lest they fall prey to the gaggle of advisers saying things like ‘we just need to get them off the mainframe.’ … Bellotti’s book could not have come at a better time, and while there are other factors in this equation, she outlines some of the most important.” —Jennifer Pahlka, OneZero“When it comes to the right processes and thought patterns for successfully dealing with legacy systems, Bellotti’s remarks are worth their weight in gold.”—Peter Schmitz, Heise Media“A most excellent book for both engineers and managers alike.”—Michael Simons, @rotnroll666“I am RIDICULOUSLY EXCITED to read this book!”—Katie Sylor-Miller, @ksylor

Marianne Bellotti has worked as a software engineer for over 15 years. She built data infrastructure for the United Nations to help humanitarian organizations share crisis data worldwide and tackled some of the oldest and most complicated computer systems in the world as part of United States Digital Service. At Auth0 she ran Platform Services, a portfolio that included shared services, untrusted code execution, and developer tools. Currently she runs Identity and Access Control at Rebellion Defense. She can be found on most social networks under the handle bellmar.