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

by Gene Kim

Punishing failure and “shooting the messenger” only cause people to hide their mistakes, and eventually, all desire to innovate is completely extinguished.

You know you’re in real trouble when even the intern feels sorry for you,

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.

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.

You can’t manufacture products in large volumes, costing thousands of dollars, without a rigorous process.

How can you create anything of value if you don’t have feedback on how it’s used?

There is nothing so rewarding as providing something to someone who really needs your help.

And this is what an effective network is all about—when you can assemble a group of motivated people to solve a big problem, even though the team looks nothing like the official org chart.

“Code deployment lead time, code deployment frequency, and time to resolve problems are predictive of software delivery, operational performance, and organizational performance, and they correlate with burnout, employee engagement, and so much more.

Tech giants like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, and Microsoft give Dev productivity responsibilities to only the most senior and experienced engineers.

It is almost impossible to predict how a program will behave if any other part of the program can change data that you’re depending on at any time,

Researchers at Google spent years on Project Oxygen and found that psychological safety was one of the most important factors of great teams: where there was confidence that the team would not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up.

what’s the plural of ‘developer’?” says Maxine. “A ‘merge conflict.’”

We don’t even need guards anymore. We love being prisoners so much, we just think the bars are there to keep us safe.

Wow

Prevention requires honesty, and honesty requires the absence of fear.

“How can you send a company down a strategic path when you haven’t thought through what all the implications are?”

“It’s been true for hundreds of years and probably thousands more: employee engagement and customer satisfaction are the only things that matter.

If you’re first to market, you will capture fifty percent of the revenue that the entire product category will ever yield.

the Hoare principle: “There are two ways to write code: write code so simple there are obviously no bugs in it, or write code so complex that there are no obvious bugs in it.”

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