2star

The Phoenix Project Someone recommended this to me and I got it for free on Kindle, so I thought I give it a go. I kind of like the concept of a novelized version of a DevOps book. I also liked the main characters and the general setup. It seemed a bit weird that a lot of best practices are completely unknown in the fictional company, but I guess this might also exist in the real world. For most of the book I was question myself why I would even read it, it is close enough to what I had to deal with in some of my jobs and I don't really find my life exciting enough to be made into a book. One of the problems I see is how rapid change is shown in the book. A very large company is turned around in less than a year and this is even managed in spite of the awful internal company politics. The Unicorn Project After reading The Phoenix Project I thought I give this one a try to see the other side of the fictional company. The Unicorn Project is the developers view of The Phoenix Project, the timelines overlap and some characters are also shared. That being said, I found the main character of this book super annoying. Apparently she is "really, really good" and keeps repeating this a few times. There is even half a chapter, which just describes how "really, really good" she is. Getting through the book with her as the central character was painful. As the first book, this one is also a long list of best practices put into a story. In this book it is put to the extreme though. And there is no reality where all of these could be applied in the short time-frame of the book. If you are interested into a novelization of a developers life I would suggest to just read The Phoenix Project and skip this one. On Goodreads The Phoenix Project The Unicorn Project

I tried a new restaurant for lunch today to expand the current set of choices. (not everything on there is good) It is called green&wich, located at C/Villaroel and Gran Via, they don’t seem to have a website yet. The location is nice, the space is open to the busy street, the design is minimal and the chairs and tables are a bit wobbly. They have two menus. I went for the 7.90 one, which gives you a salad, a sandwich, drink and a coffee. I had a rocket, tomato and parmesan salad, which was soggy but still had hard stems in it. A pretty awful combination. The “asia” sandwich was ok, but not much better than the packaged ones you get in the supermarket. Barcelona really does need a Pret-A-Manger to show the locals what fresh a sandwich looks like. I had a cortado for coffee, which still contained coffee powder. The search continues…