Kent Beck in Oslo

Today Kent Beck came over to give a presentation to a classroom of us.  For everyone who doesn't know, Kent Beck is the inventor of the eXtreme Programming methodology and one of the original signatories of the Agile manifesto.  Basically everyone who has done or is planning to do (which is a lot of people) agile development has to thank him for it.  I guess you could say he is a programming rockstar.  If that doesn't make sense to you, well imagine you're an artist and you get to see Leonardo Da Vinci, that's how big he is.  I studied what he preached back in the university days and it's what I did at a former workplace, pair programming, scrums and all that, all of that comes from Agile methodology.  So it's really really cool to see him present in person where I work.

Learn - Measure - Build, he talks about it here.

Later this afternoon, Kent did some peer programming with some of the other engineers on a different team.  I'm not part of the team but sure would've liked him to suggest on some code that I'm currently working on, or rather wish I wasn't working on because it's bad code and not maintainable.  Writing code is like writing a book with multiple endings (remember those?) that live on for a long time, so you want to make sure your words and sentences are understandable and changeable.  Unfortunately that is often not the case.  The code I'm working on is written by someone very experienced so I was a bit surprised that it is what it is.