The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

by Gene Kim

there’s something even more important than code: the systems that enable developers to be productive, so that they can write high-quality code quickly and safely, freeing themselves from all the things that prevent them from solving important business problems.

when engineers think of “the customer” in the abstract instead of as a real person, you rarely get the right outcomes.

developers need a system where they can get fast and continual feedback on the quality of their work. If you don’t find problems quickly, you end up finding them months later. By then, the problem is lost in all the other changes that every other developer made, so the link between cause and effect disappears without a trace. That’s no way to run any project.”

production deployments are some of the most complex activities of any technology organization, because they require so much coordination between so many different parts of the organization.

Ward Cunningham in 2003. He said, ‘technical debt is what you feel the next time you want to make a change.’ There are many things that people call technical debt, but it usually refers to things we need to clean up, or where we need to create or restore simplicity, so that that we can quickly, confidently, and safely make changes to the system.

When a fool spends all their time on features, the inevitable outcome is that even easy tasks become difficult and take longer to execute.

The last place we want complexity is internally, whether it’s in our code, in our organization, or in our processes.

Software is like a city, constantly undergoing change, needing renovations and repair.

Being able to test and push code to production is more productive, makes for happier customers, creates accountability of code quality to the people who write it, and also makes the work more joyful and rewarding.

If only my manager understood this 😞

No one will take risks, experiment, or innovate in a culture of fear, where people are afraid to tell the boss bad news,”

Small batch sizes, like in manufacturing, create a smooth flow of work, with no jarring disruptions or catastrophes.