Helping Geeks Feel Safe in the World
I’m Kent Beck & my mission is to help geeks feel safe in the world.
Help. I can’t make anyone else feel anything but I can help.
Geeks. I speak first to people like me, geeks, who care about mechanisms & puzzles & surprising ideas.
Feel. Living in my head most of the time divorced me from my emotions, which came back to bite me later. Hard. So I talk about emotions but also ideas from the perspective of how they affect & are affected by feelings.
Safe. I often feel unsafe in situations where I’m perfectly safe, like a cocktail party. Sometimes I feel safe in situations where I’m acting unsafe, like pushing code that will break the system. I want my feelings of safety (or unsafety) to match the facts.
In the world. Yes I talk about programming & software development, but I have learned my skills in the world at large contribute to my geeky pursuits & my geeky skills can contribute to the rest of my life.
How Did I Discover My Mission?
I looked at the things I had done in the first 2 decades of my career & asked what in the world tied together patterns, JUnit, TDD, & Extreme Programming? The phrase, helping geeks feel safe in the world, popped into my head.
At first I thought what in the world does that mean? Then I realized that feeling safe when I was actually safe was a desperate wish of mine. I was beset by anxiety at the time. Each of the projects above increased safety:
Patterns—Design discussions that are more likely to result in shared understanding & agreement.
JUnit—Does this code work? The answer is a button press away. (I used to press the button 2 or 3 times if I really needed reassurance.)
TDD—Do I know what the code is supposed to do? If I’m under time pressure, how will I know the code works?
Extreme Programming—A whole set of safety-enhanced personal interactions.
Join the crew
Be part of a community of people who care about the hard questions of software design:
When?
Why?
How much?
Who?
And most importantly:
How’s that feel?
To find out more about the author visit KentBeck.com.
