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

by Gene Kim

the systems that enable developers to be productive, so that they can write high-quality

functional programming because she knows that pure functions and composability are better tools to think with. 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.

Trying to get a Phoenix build going is like playing Legend of Zelda, if it were written by a sadist, forcing her to adventure far and wide to find hidden keys scattered across the kingdom and given only measly clues from uncaring NPCs. But when you finally finish the level, you can’t actually play the next level—you have to mail paper coupons to the manufacturer and wait weeks to get the activation codes.

She’s baffled that no one knows of an actual person who uses Phoenix. Just who are they building all this code for?

Along with her ever expanding to-do list, Maxine has kept a daily work diary on her personal laptop for the last decade. In it, she tracks everything she’s worked on, how much time she spent on it, any interesting lessons she learned from it, and a list of things to never do again (most recently, “Don’t waste time trying to escape spaces in file names in Makefiles—it’s too difficult. Use anything else instead.”).

I’ve gotten so little done in two days. Everything I try to do requires an email, a ticket, or trying to find someone. I’m now resorting to asking them out for coffee. Maybe I’ll get more responses.

OMG. Almost no one else can build Phoenix on their laptops, either. They’re supposed to deploy this into production in TWO WEEKS! (No one is worried. Crazy. They think it will be delayed again.) If I were in their shoes, I’d be losing my shit. Oh, well.

p.m.: I found a bunch of contractor developers brought in two months ago. They can’t do builds, either. Shocking. I took them out to lunch. What a disappointment. They know even less than I do. At least the salad was okay. I shared everything I know with them, which they were extremely grateful for. Always good to give more than you get—you never know who can help you in the future. Networking matters.

But the vast majority of their customers don’t have that luxury. Their cars are older, sometimes older than her kids—in fact, their customers may be driving the same make, model, and year of the car she drove as a teenager. They often have little discretionary income. When something goes wrong with their car, it can wipe out whatever savings they have (if any). And when their car is at a repair shop, they not only deplete their savings but they also can’t drive to work. And that means they can’t provide for their families. Maxine appreciates these reminders about their customers—when engineers think of “the customer” in the abstract instead of as a real person, you rarely get the right outcomes.

“Our biggest quarter is still coming up, so there’s hope. But hope alone is not a strategy, and you can see how Wall Street has reacted to our performance so far. However, I remain confident that the Phoenix Project will help us adapt to these new market conditions.