Kent Beck

Background

About Kent Beck

My career mission is to help geeks feel safe in the world. My business proposition is to help your engineering/product/design organization grow from 100+ people to people. Programming brings me joy. The only thing better is teaching programming and watching the faces of students when they "get it". Therefore, I arrange my work to maximize the amount of time I spend programming and teaching programming. I always have a portfolio of research projects going. Currently I am studying:* 3X: Explore/Expand/Extract. As a product matures, the tradeoffs affecting its development change dramatically. What are these changes and how can we respond to them?* Power law distributions. Power laws appear despite our best efforts. How should we adapt our tools and techniques to the inexorable laws of nature.* Programs as nature. I study the structure and evolution of programs using the same tools used to study the structure and evolution of the natural world.* Quantitative studies of software engineering. For example, I have data that implies that programming language does not affect the size of diffs but deployment frequency does.* Coaching. How to deliver it, scale it, teach it, and measure it.* Tree-based tools. Source text is dead, it's just taking a while to quit twitching. Some day the whole toolchain, from editors on, will work with syntax trees.* Smalltalk. What does Smalltalk still have to teach the programmers of today? Lots, it turns out.* Reversibility. When you can un-make decisions, then you can afford to make many more of them.* Software development at scale. How can we visualize work flowing through tens of thousands of developers, designers, project managers, and operations engineers? How can we optimize based on data from decades of development? I have programmed for 45 years, 32 professionally. I am fluent in Java, Smalltalk, and Eclipse. I do pretty well in JavaScript, PHP/Hack, and Python. Specialties: Software process, agile development, incremental design, test-driven development, the insurance industry, social media.