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I am continuing work on "Tidy First? An Exercise In Empirical Software Design" as a @substack . No paid tier yet, but that's where book chapters will be appearing. Sign up here: kentbeck.substack.com.
Kent Beck 🌻
17.1K posts
Kent Beck 🌻
@KentBeck
Pioneered JUnit/xUnit, patterns, XP, TDD. Ex-Apple, Meta, Gusto, Mechanical Orchard. Learning to be me. Blogging at newsletter.kentbeck.com.
- I’ve been reluctant to try ChatGPT. Today I got over that reluctance. Now I understand why I was reluctant. The value of 90% of my skills just dropped to $0. The leverage for the remaining 10% went up 1000x. I need to recalibrate.
- Engineering turns ideas into reality. Science turns reality into ideas.
- Being proud of 100% test coverage is like being proud of reading every word in the newspaper. Some are more important than others.
- My vote for most valuable programming skill? Walking. I spent 15 minutes going and picking up my laundry and figured out how to avoid 10 hours of programming. 40:1!
- A 12-month roadmap is like a box of a dozen donuts & you can only eat 1 a month. By the time you get to 10, 11, 12 you'd really rather eat a fresh one. But no, you're in the Clean Plate Club so you choke 'em down.
- The goal of software design is to create chunks or slices that fit into a human mind. The software keeps growing but the human mind maxes out, so we have to keep chunking and slicing differently if we want to keep making changes.
- If there’s one lesson I would like the next generation of developers to learn, it is to spend less time doing hard things and more time making hard things easy. Customers benefit from the former. Customers and peers and we ourselves benefit from the latter.
- for each desired change, make the change easy (warning: this may be hard), then make the easy change
- Spotify didn’t implement the Spotify model by copying Spotify. Why do folks at other companies think they can implement the Spotify model by copying Spotify?
- "Outsourcing unit testing" -- wtaf? That's like wanting to be fit so you pay someone else to exercise.
- Replying to @DeanPrestonAs a resident, you answer does not meet my needs. I want to park my car free from fear. If you can't help me do that, why exactly are you in office?
