The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data
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Review : A Wall Street Journal Bestseller! In The Unicorn Project, we follow Maxine, a senior lead developer and architect, as she is exiled to the Phoenix Project, to the horror of her friends and colleagues, as punishment for contributing to a payroll outage. She tries to survive in what feels like a heartless and uncaring bureaucracy and to work within a system where no one can get anything done without endless committees, paperwork, and approvals. The Age of Software is here, and another mass extinction event looms―this is a story about rebel developers and business leaders working together, racing against time to innovate, survive, and thrive in a time of unprecedented uncertainty…and opportunity. Read more
Review : Imagine you get blamed by management, you personally, for some systemic issue that caused widespread disruption. They're looking for a scapegoat - someone to fire so the negative focus gets sucked out in the wake of that person's departure - but in this case you were lucky enough to have a friend in high places. So you get reassigned, sent to a cumbersome impossible trailing-edge project where no one will notice you. Maybe your growing anger and resentment will finally make it possible for you to seek revenge, to pay them back? Maybe you can teach them all a lesson? But there's something about you that just can't go there - you don't create problems, you solve them! And despite your worst intentions, you find yourself getting curious about this back-water project - why is it so broken? Where do I get started, figuring it all out? Who can help and how did it get this way? What value could customers get if we could just find a way to deliver results? This is the opening setup for Maxine Chambers, development leader and software architect at Parts Unlimited, Inc., in The Unicorn Project, Gene Kim's follow-up to The Phoenix Project. As stated in its subtitle, The Unicorn Project is "a novel about developers, digital disruption, and thriving in the age of data." Kim brings together key concepts from Geoffrey Moore, Jez Humble, Donald Reinertsen, Mik Kersten, Mark Schwartz, Peter Senge, and stories from the trenches of transformation from the DevOps Enterprise Summit conference series to capture a blueprint for transformational success that's based on the perspectives and efforts of software engineers. Not many novels bring to life the daily struggles of software engineers, so this comparatively rare mirror placed in front of us offers a welcome chance to reflect on a large set of key questions, such as: • How close are we to the results of our efforts? Do we get to see our customers' delight? • Can we execute quick experiments, get rapid feedback, and iterate? • Are we fans of pragmatic programming, functional programming? • How often are we bitten by mutability in our code? • Are we satisfied in our work? If not, what might be some systemic causes of our dissatisfaction? • Do our systems enable us to focus or are we continually context-shifting? • Are we able to collaborate easily across functions and teams? • Even better, have we reduced interdependencies to the absolute minimum? • When things go wrong, does the organization focus on blame or on systemic corrections? • Are we generating technical debt faster than we're paying it down? • How much toil do we face every day? Unplanned work? Internal work? • How do we carve out time for improvement, or even time just to think? • What's the relationship between engineering and "the business" really like, here? But despite all the instructional value in this book, it's very easy to get caught up in the drama of the story. Parts Unlimited is a very large, traditional enterprise that must transform to survive. The legacy of complex and entangled architectures, out-of-date processes, methods, and tools have generated a context in which innovation dies long before it can complete its journey to customers. A brave group of engineers form a "rebellion" to confront this legacy and create a lasting business transformation, both technological and cultural. To organize the dramatic principles at work in the story, Gene Kim came up with The Five Ideals of DevOps: 1. Locality and Simplicity (reduce interdependency, own your code in production, microservices architecture) 2. Focus, Flow, and Joy (limit work in progress, make work visible, see the value of your contributions) 3. Improvement of Daily Work (pay down technical debt, streamline the architecture) 4. Psychological Safety (blameless culture, systems thinking, shared context) 5. Customer Focus (core vs. context, feedback) Elements of the storyline are adeptly woven through these five ideals, clarifying each one and giving them practical weight. Plot twists, setbacks, sudden breakthroughs, a major RIF, taking a sledgehammer to old server equipment, and C-level treachery make this a very compelling read. One of my favorite parts involves a QA joke Bill Sempf shared on Twitter: "QA engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a sfdeljknesv." Although the speed at which certain miraculous improvements happen defies belief at times, the novel is full of inspiring tales of software engineers getting excited about better methods, shaking off the shackles of the status quo, and getting it done right.
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