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Facebook's Beck graces Agile Africa Conference

Admire Moyo
By Admire Moyo, ITWeb's news editor.
Johannesburg, 21 Jul 2015
Facebook's Kent Beck will discuss how Facebook seized the social networking opportunity when others fumbled it.
Facebook's Kent Beck will discuss how Facebook seized the social networking opportunity when others fumbled it.

The Joburg Centre for Software Engineering (JSCE) at Wits University has confirmed that Facebook's programmer Kent Beck will be one of the keynote speakers at the third annual Agile Africa Conference set for 24 to 26 August 2015.

"We are excited to have Kent Beck as one of our keynote speakers at this year's Agile Africa," says Professor Barry Dwolatzky, JCSE director. "He is world renowned as a pioneer of Agile and the father of eXtreme Programming, or XP.

"We look forward to his address titled 'Managing by the Book: Ten Improbable Policies that Conquered the World'," he adds.

Beck was one of the 17 original signatories of the Agile Manifesto, the founding document for Agile software development. Extreme and Agile methods are closely associated with Test Driven Development, of which Beck is perhaps the leading proponent.

He pioneered software design patterns as well as the commercial application of Smalltalk. He wrote the SUnit unit testing framework for Smalltalk, which spawned the xUnit series of frameworks, notably JUnit for Java, which Beck wrote with Erich Gamma.

In his keynote, Beck will discuss how Facebook seized the social networking opportunity when others fumbled it. Having worked as a programmer for Facebook since 2011, Beck says one of the many factors that had to go right was for the engineering to keep up with unprecedented, unpredictable, explosive growth of social media.

The secret, according to him, is not so secret: "Everyone takes personal responsibility for the entire system and instead of making up for a lack of responsibility, Facebook's engineering policies foster and exploit personal responsibility.

"My Agile Africa 2015 talk presents the thinking behind ten of these policies that contradict conventional wisdom," explains Beck.

Over the four years at Facebook, Beck has worked on privacy, messaging infrastructure and coaching for promising engineers. Before that he was a pioneer in patterns for software, Extreme Programming, Test-Driven Development, and the xUnit family of testing frameworks. His research includes syntax-tree-based development tools and the quantitative study of software design and software process.

"This is by far our best Agile Africa line-up yet and we are looking forward to Kent's keynote and his wisdom after 43 years of programming," says Dwolatzky.

Agile Africa 2015 will take place at The Parktonian Hotel and will yet again be part of the Fak'ugesi Digital Africa Festival, which runs from 24 August until 13 September 2015.

Click here for more details about the event.

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