I've been stuck for a few months now, but I've slowly been picking up listening to The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, as an audio book. And it did not take long before I fell in love with the book, and couldn't stop listening.

It is a novel portraying the spectrum from soul crushing to fulfilling IT work. A story about automation and the great benefits we can reap from it, so long as we understand the investment that needs to be made in tooling. An investment in the business.

It starts out, describing a downwards spiral. The one we all know too well. It's got all the clichés. Stress leads to shortcuts, which leads to unplanned emergency work, which leads to more shortcuts, and more emergency work. Or firefighting as some call it. The feeling that anything you want to do, takes unfathomable amounts of time to get done. Because the house of cards is just too unstable, you're never sure when it's going to fall over. Though I've been mostly in the "spaghetti code" manifestation of this, rather than IT/operational instability.

The book then presents a solution. Which is basically DevOps. And this is probably my one complaint about the book. The character that was introduced to mentor the group, suddenly has too many straight answers. I felt a little cheated on the path towards the insights. Which I feel was such a strength of the first part of the book.

Anyways - I just got to say that this is one of the best books I've had the pleasure of experiencing so far. At least in recent memory. The novel form really helps.