Book Review: The Unicorn Project

I had pre-ordered this book, and when it was released on 26 November 2019, I read it immediately.  Its a follow-up to the Phoenix Project, yet takes place in the same time and series of events as the as Phoenix Project. The author, Gene Kim, describes it like this on twitter:

while The Phoenix Project addresses the Ops side of the story, we’ve just released The #UnicornProject by @realgenekim which covers the #Dev side

This book did not disappoint. Its truly inspirational, drawing from real world stories and the many of the sources of DevOps (that I also wrote about here)

• Lean
• Learning Organisations
• Safety Culture
• and many others

Be sure to read all the articles listed in the Reference section in the back - which is the source of the real world stories that inspired sections of the book.

Series of books

• 2013: The Phoenix Project
• 2016: The DevOps Handbook
• 2018: Beyond The Phoenix Project - an audio series, the authors discuss the motivations and sources of knowledge, like Lean, Learning Orgs, Safety Culture, etc, and the previous works and people that DevOps draws upon. This was amazing, and gives a real understanding to what really is DevOps.
• 2018: Accelerate: Unlike all the books in this series, this is not written like a fictional story, but is the data behind the State of DevOps reports, and shows what the real impact is of DevOps
• 2019: The Unicorn Project - this book incorporates much of the theory of the Beyond The Phoenix Project audio series, and applies to the same story line of the Phoenix Project, from the side of the developers.