Gene Kim is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, researcher, and multiple award-winning CTO. He has been studying high-performing technology organizations since 1999 and was the founder and CTO of Tripwire for 13 years. He is the author of six books, The Unicorn Project (2019), and co-author of the Shingo Publication Award winning Accelerate (2018), The DevOps Handbook (2016), and The Phoenix Project (2013). Since 2014, he has been the founder and organizer of DevOps Enterprise Summit, studying the technology transformations of large, complex organizations.
Be sure to check out the additional episodes of the “Livin' on the Edge” podcast.
Key takeaways from the podcast included:
- Conferences, whether in-person or virtual, provide inspiration, knowledge sharing opportunities, and a sense of community: “great adventures demand great collaborators, or maybe it's even the other way around.”
- Cultivating an effective developer experience with safe and fast developer feedback loops are vitally important within the larger context of DevOps and the delivery of value to customers.
- Organisations like Amazon, Netflix, Google, and Microsoft recognize the value of developer experience and often have their most senior developers working on improving developer productivity. The next most senior engineers work on backend services and APIs, and junior engineers often work on features. In most other enterprises, the approach taken is the opposite way around.
- Using the read-eval-print-loop (REPL) within a language like Clojure allows for very fast developer iteration. Appropriately mocking or stubbing external dependencies within the inner developer loop reduces the build-test-iterate friction further.
- As stated by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais in their book “Team Topologies”, the platform that engineers deploy onto should codify operational best practices that promote flow when testing, deploying, and releasing: “if you run it on the platform, you inherit the best known understanding of how to solve certain problems safely, securely, abd reliably, without actually having to know it all.”
- "The Unicorn Project" introduces “five ideals”, or values and principles, that frame today's most important IT challenges that are impacting engineering and business: locality and simplicity; focus, flow, and joy; improvement of daily work; psychological safety; and customer focus.
- Maxine, the protagonist of The Unicorn Project, is an amazing engineer but after she is exiled to the Phoenix Project she can get no work done because of the ineffective developer experience: “she can't write tests, she can't write run tests, she can't even get the help she needs. The mythical 10x developer is now Tom Hanks in the movie Castaway where they can get nothing done.”
- Locality and simplicity can often be simplified down to the “lunch factor”: when you want to get something done, how many people do you need to take out the lunch? Partitioning of domains, creating loosely coupled architectures, and enabling build and test isolation allow small teams to independently build, test, and deliver value to customers.
- Focus, flow, and joy is all about the psychology of optimal experience, being in “the zone”, and being able to get stuff done. Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's work in this space is highly recommend for listeners wanting to know more.
- Continuous improvement is driven by culture. “Learning to Lead” by Dr Steven Spear is a highly influential paper in this space. "Transforming Nokia" by Risto Siilasmaa is a candid book that talks about group dynamics that is relevant to any leader.
- Large enterprise organizations have the potential to win markets when they focus appropriately on engineering productivity: “it's not small beats big. It's fast beats slow, and so big and fast can decimate the competition”. The book “Project to Product” Dr Mik Kersten outlines how enterprises can thrive in the age of digital disruption.
- Psychological safety and customer focus are vitally important when it comes to collaborating to sustainably deliver value to a business.
