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KentBeck
2,471karma·231submissions·April 6, 2009
about
Kent Beck is a programmer, author, artist, father, and singing guitarist.
recent activity (231 total)
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Who will pay for the servers?
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Yes
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I'm about to turn 53. I spend most of my day coaching younger programmers at Facebook (because they're almost all younger). We pair program and talk. I work on speculative projects, some con…
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That's an interesting reversal of the logic in the paper. I assumed that the programmers looking for the next cool languages were doing so in pursuit of novelty and not doing it for economic reasons. …
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I coach full-time at Facebook, and I coached for various clients part-time for a decade before that. We work a bit on technical stuff like how to design, test, or refactor, but honestly the technical …
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I think a real artist is required for the authentic effect. I asked for the original and was firmly told that it goes into their archives.
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Yep. Fulfillment of a childhood dream, that. I'm just sad Ward didn't get his picture in there too. He doesn't get his (large) share of the credit.
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Yes, that was me. I get stuck sometimes. In this case the key insight is that the recursive algorithm is much easier to get to work than the iterative one. There was also the added complexity of two m…
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There are lots of good points made here, but I'll add one: write the environment in itself. The original vision for Smalltalk is that you would be using some application, get curious about how it work…
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I'm a geezer (50) at Facebook. It's not the hours, as Indiana Jones might have said had he been a programmer, it's the lines. (I don't know what that means--it's just too good a line to pass up.) Ther…
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We are in the very early days for finding the profit-maximizing prices for ebooks. If publishers stand in the way of experimentation, someone else will find the sweet spots (I don't expect there to be…
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I think you have it right. Latency-oriented engineering is a style of development that minimizes the time through the entire loop from idea to learning to feedback from real users to learning based on…
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In a startup, you need to engineer to minimize the latency of validating features. Sometimes tests help with that (like when you're dealing with a complicated algorithm), sometimes they don't. I wrote…