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

by Gene Kim

When Maxine sees Tom pull up the Ops ticketing system and create a new ticket, she asks, “What’s this for?” “We need the production logs for Data Hub and its connectors to see if they’re handling traffic or if they’ve crashed,” he responds, filling out the numerous fields. “We can’t directly access production logs?” Maxine asks, afraid of the answer. “Nope. Ops people won’t let us,” he says, typing into the form. “So, someone has to respond to the ticket and copy the logs off the server for us?” she asks in disbelief. “Yes,” he says, continuing to type, obviously very practiced at filling it out. He tabs between fields, types, mouses over to hit the drop-down box, hits the submit button, only to find that there’s still another required field that needs to be filled in. Maxine groans. The Data Hub application that they’re working on might as well be running in outer space or at the bottom of a deep well. They can’t directly access it, they can’t see what it’s doing, and the only way they can understand what’s actually happening is to talk to someone in Operations through the ticketing system.