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1 week ago | 
tidyfirst.substack.com | Kent Beck
Before you start, I’m not advocating for anything here. I spent a large part of my career giving people permission to work on one thing at a time (run/right/fast, interface/implementation, behavior/structure). As I integrate genies into my work more fully, though, I notice myself doing something that looks like multi-tasking more & more. This is my attem…
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2 weeks ago | 
tidyfirst.substack.com | Kent Beck
It’s been a while since the last chapter. The end is in sight, though. I have a table of contents I like and I can see how to get all these chapters written. Expect more soon.
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2 weeks ago | 
tidyfirst.substack.com | Kent Beck
Originally published May 20, 2015. Since then my cognitive function has made a fairly complete comeback, well except accounting for normal aging. I was reminded of this essay by my experience with augmented coding. That “normal aging” stuff left me without the patience to get set up for coding. With the genie, though, I’m happy to dive into most any project. It’s like wearing an exoskeleton but for my brain. The point remains—don’t take cognition for granted.
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2 weeks ago | 
tidyfirst.substack.com | Kent Beck
I’m going to put little lessons I learn augmented coding here as posts. Posts/notes/chat—Substack has a bit of a product problem. I want these out there, though, so I’ll post them to my paying subscribers first, then make them public in a month or so (if I remember to do so).
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2 weeks ago | 
tidyfirst.substack.com | Kent Beck
I’m working on a project in Rust to build a performance-competitive, library-quality implementation of a map with sorted keys. Since it's a new language for me, I didn't notice the genie using an awkward idiom when calling functions that return an Option. The (apparently) default style is to explicitly check results with an if statement. if let Some(left)…
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3 weeks ago | 
tidyfirst.substack.com | Kent Beck
At CraftConf this year I debuted a talk on Canon TDD. More on that later, but I just ran across a good example of a concept I introduced in that talk & y’all know how precious good examples are. One critique of TDD is that there’s no place in it for design. If you’re a practitioner you know that’s not true, but if that’s what it looks like from the outsi…
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3 weeks ago | 
tidyfirst.substack.com | Kent Beck
One of my experimental projects is to see if I can write a library-quality, performance-competitive basic data structure with a genie. This started when I was building an experimental database project for an experimental programming language (are you sensing a theme here?) project. If you can’t get the data structures right, none of the rest of those higher layers are going to work either. This isn’t vibe coding.
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3 weeks ago | 
tidyfirst.substack.com | Kent Beck
Two days until TWC I (I think we’re going with the Super Bowl-style Roman numeraling). It’s sold out, but we hope to have a larger-capacity TWC II soon so if you missed out, please don’t despair. I want to thank the team, without whom this definitely wouldn’t have happened. • None —the ringleader. Took a vague idea from me. Filled in all the details. Kept gentl…
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4 weeks ago | 
tidyfirst.substack.com | Kent Beck
I’ll write a more thorough version of this for public consumption, but given the pace of change around augmented coding I wanted to share a technique I may have found. That is, I found the technique, but I’m not sure how widely applicable it is. I hope you’ll help me find out.
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1 month ago | 
tidyfirst.substack.com | Kent Beck
Recent augmented coding episodes reminded me of a book that changed my thinking about learning: Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. We’re so focused on Production = Productivity that we forget that in the long-term Learning = Productivity. I’ve mentioned that I’m coding in languages that I don’t know well, sometimes that I don’t know at all.
