The Unicorn Project – Gene Kim – Book

Overall 5/10 – Having read and loved the phoenix project, I had high expectations for this book, perhaps too high. It felt like the same message and story regurgitated to sell another book. Perhaps if I hadn’t seen most the ideas before elsewhere it would have felt newer and more impactful.

Book Notes:

• Compared to the previous book there is a lot more emphasis on people skills,
  it’s great to see this highlighted in a book for programmers where that kind of networking isn’t as common.
  Examples:
  • The “rebellion” team was formed as a ragtag coalition of people that wanted to make a difference
  • Kurt operated at the edge of permitted staff behaviour to get the resources the team needed
  • Maxine visited people outside her own department in person to build alliances
  • She asked how they completed their work and helped them find where they fitted into the overall flow to increase throughput overall
  • Sarahs toxic behaviour and the need for psychological safety
• Some problems seem highly exaggerated to reach foregone conclusions to point at fashionable technology.
  • For example getting a working build takes weeks = containers.
  • Concurrency issue = Immutability and Functional programming solves the day
  • I wouldn’t disagree that those technologies are great for some problems, it just seemed they were thrown into the book to namedrop.
• Near the very end it proposes that large companies can outpace their smaller rivals as they have the relationships, resources and data.
  I’m not sure I entirely buy that. One of the hardest things to change is values and perceptions.
• Project Shamu sounded interesting, taking 23 API calls that have their own SLAs and reducing them to one dependency without caching. I wondered what technology this was referring to but googling didn’t help. Any ideas?

The Five Ideals

These are the ideals presented at the back of the book. I can certainly agree on their importance:

1. Locality and Simplicity
2. Focus, Flow and Joy
3. Improvement of Daily Work
4. Psychological Safety
5. Customer Focus