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

by Gene Kim

Creating software should be a collaborative and conversational endeavor—individuals need to interact with each other to create new knowledge and value for the customer.

Without constant feedback from a centralized build, integration, and test system, they really have no idea what will happen when all their work is merged with everyone else’s.

Maxine loves coding and she’s awesome at it. But she knows that 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.

She eschews imperative programming in favor of declarative modes of thinking. She despises and has a healthy fear of state mutation and non-referential transparency. She favors the lambda calculus over Turing machines because of their mathematical purity. She loves LISPs because she loves her code as data and vice versa.

Everyone around here thinks features are important, because they can see them in their app, on the web page, or in the API. But no one seems to realize how important the build process is. Developers cannot be productive without a great build, integration, and test process.

This is why Maxine is so dedicated to applying functional programming principles everywhere. Learning Clojure, her favorite programming language, was the most difficult thing she had ever done,

I’ve finally created a semi-reproducible test case—it happens about one out of ten times. I’m pretty sure it’s because of a race condition.”

Maxine once heard a joke: “A QA engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders zero beers. Orders 999,999,999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders negative one beer. Orders a ‘sfdeljknesv.’”

This is one of the great things about using Docker containers, Maxine thinks. Containers are immutable, unable to be changed after they’re created, so if it works in Dev, it will almost certainly work in Test.

“We already have all the data from the TOFU—top of the funnel. We need information about the customer lifetime value from BOFU—bottom of the funnel.”

She is proposing to build a Spark-like big data and compute platform, fed by an entirely new event-streaming bus, modeled closely to what the tech giants all have built to solve their data problems at scale. It would allow hundreds, even thousands, of CPU cores to be thrown at the computations,

“For feature promotions, A/B tests, or algorithmic testing, you may be thrilled to even have five percent of tests work.

They used a technique called Wardley Maps to better localize what parts of various value chains were commodities and should be outsourced, which should be purchased, and which should be kept in-house because they created durable, competitive advantage.

THE FIVE IDEALS The First Ideal: Locality and Simplicity The Second Ideal: Focus, Flow, and Joy The Third Ideal: Improvement of Daily Work The Fourth Ideal: Psychological Safety The Fifth Ideal: Customer Focus