@GergelyOrosz: There are few people who have impacted the software engineering industry like @KentBeck has. He'd never before told his…

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Summary

A podcast interview with Kent Beck covers his career from early programming to Agile and TDD, emphasizing the importance of human skills in software engineering.

There are few people who have impacted the software engineering industry like @KentBeck has. He'd never before told his career story from start to today in one sitting - until now. What a treat. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 03:47 Human engineers aren’t going away 08:00 Kent's path into tech 13:50 Undergraduate and graduate studies 17:21 Kent’s first programming job 18:54 The rise and fall of Smalltalk 27:04 Working with Ward Cunningham 37:36 Design patterns 44:05 Working at Apple 51:08 CRC Cards 59:29 Testing tools in the language 1:04:22 The C3 project with Martin Fowler 1:09:54 Extreme Programming 1:16:25 Developing TDD 1:25:07 Writing the Agile Manifesto 1:30:00 Agile’s impact 1:32:40 Agile’s downside 1:37:32 The Dotcom Bust 1:44:30 Lessons from working at Facebook 1:59:44 Kent’s ‘Good to Great’ program at Facebook 2:06:07 Soft skills engineers need to learn 2:09:30 AI and the challenges of acceleration 2:15:53 Explore, expand, extract 2:22:33 What Kent is excited about Brought to you by: • @AntithesisHQ – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages https://antithesis.com/pragmatic • @turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable https://turbopuffer.com/pragmatic • @WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready https://workos.com Kent shared so many previously untold stories - like how he was fired from Apple (!!), how he and Ward Cunningham used a thesaurus to find the right words, how the Agile Manifesto came together. My favorite reflection from is this though: The human part is the most important one in software engineering. As Kent explained: “This is the biggest cosmic, practical joke ever. As young people, we were promised: “Okay, here’s this computer and once you’ve completely understand this computer, you’ll be fine. That’s all you need to do.” So I set out the first part of my career just to become the best programmer that I could be because that’s what it would take to be successful. And then you realize: sorry, there’s this whole human side. Your ability to affect change in the world is gated by your ability to communicate with, to soothe, to understand other human beings. And those are exactly the skills that I thought I didn’t need to learn! So I was promised: just understand the computer and you’ll be successful. And then someone went “just kidding, understand people!” And now I was in a position of being ten years behind.”
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There are few people who have impacted the software engineering industry like @KentBeck has. He’d never before told his career story from start to today in one sitting - until now. What a treat. Timestamps:

00:00 Intro 03:47 Human engineers aren’t going away 08:00 Kent’s path into tech 13:50 Undergraduate and graduate studies 17:21 Kent’s first programming job 18:54 The rise and fall of Smalltalk 27:04 Working with Ward Cunningham 37:36 Design patterns 44:05 Working at Apple 51:08 CRC Cards 59:29 Testing tools in the language 1:04:22 The C3 project with Martin Fowler 1:09:54 Extreme Programming 1:16:25 Developing TDD 1:25:07 Writing the Agile Manifesto 1:30:00 Agile’s impact 1:32:40 Agile’s downside 1:37:32 The Dotcom Bust 1:44:30 Lessons from working at Facebook 1:59:44 Kent’s ‘Good to Great’ program at Facebook 2:06:07 Soft skills engineers need to learn 2:09:30 AI and the challenges of acceleration 2:15:53 Explore, expand, extract 2:22:33 What Kent is excited about

Brought to you by:

• @AntithesisHQ – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages https://antithesis.com/pragmatic

• @turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable https://turbopuffer.com/pragmatic

• @WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready https://workos.com

Kent shared so many previously untold stories - like how he was fired from Apple (!!), how he and Ward Cunningham used a thesaurus to find the right words, how the Agile Manifesto came together. My favorite reflection from is this though:

The human part is the most important one in software engineering. As Kent explained:

“This is the biggest cosmic, practical joke ever. As young people, we were promised: “Okay, here’s this computer and once you’ve completely understand this computer, you’ll be fine. That’s all you need to do.”

So I set out the first part of my career just to become the best programmer that I could be because that’s what it would take to be successful. And then you realize: sorry, there’s this whole human side. Your ability to affect change in the world is gated by your ability to communicate with, to soothe, to understand other human beings. And those are exactly the skills that I thought I didn’t need to learn!

So I was promised: just understand the computer and you’ll be successful. And then someone went “just kidding, understand people!” And now I was in a position of being ten years behind.”

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