Gene Kim

Gene Kim wrote the first version of Tripwire, an intrusion-detection tool for Unix, as an undergraduate at Purdue University in 1992. He co-founded Tripwire, Inc. in 1998 and served as its CTO until 2010. That hands-on security work became the foundation for a longer study of what separates high-performing IT organizations from the rest. Around 2000 he began tracking what he called "people with great kung fu" in IT, and those notes eventually became the Visible Ops books, co-written with Kevin Behr.

His best-known work is The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win (2013), co-authored with Kevin Behr and George Spafford. The book is deliberately modeled on Eliyahu Goldratt's The Goal, using a novel format to walk readers through the dysfunction and eventual recovery of a struggling IT department. It has become a widely referenced text in the DevOps community. Follow-up titles include The Unicorn Project (2019), which introduces what Kim calls the Five Ideals, and The DevOps Handbook.

Kim also contributed to the research behind Accelerate and the State of DevOps Reports alongside Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble, and he hosted the DevOps Enterprise Summit. His earlier work helped shape the GAIT Principles for Sarbanes-Oxley IT controls and the PCI Scoping Special Interest Group.

A new reader should start with The Phoenix Project. Its narrative structure makes the operational and cultural problems of IT departments concrete before introducing any methodology, so the ideas land even if the reader never touches a deployment pipeline.