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Honest conversations about fear, uncertainty, and what it means to build things when the ground keeps shifting.
Season One is sponsored by WorkOS and Augment Code.
[00:00:00;00 - 00:00:03;29]
(Birds Chirping)
[00:00:03;29 - 00:01:07;29]
Kent Beck
The gap between an idea and a running system has never been narrower, and that's exciting. The gap between a running system and a mature, fully running system is the same as it ever was. And the difference is not feature set, the difference is trust. Security, auditability, identity, the list of items a CISO hands you before your system will run in their system. Teams try to tackle this themselves. How hard could it be? It turns out that this is both a very important problem and a very complex problem. That's where WorkOS comes in. Single sign-on, identity providers, role-based access management. WorkOS gives you the infrastructure to trust the systems that you're excited to have built.
[00:01:07;29 - 00:01:50;14]
Kent Beck
I'd like to thank Augment Code for sponsoring this first season of Still Burning. I can remember my excitement when I saw my first IDE. You could find anything, you could change any code, and I was just so excited. But the era of making changes to code like a watchmaker is gone. Most of the changes now are going to be made by the genie, and Augment Code is helping go beyond the IDE with their new intent product. Programmers stay oriented, they keep learning, they see what's happened, they make strategic decisions, and meanwhile, agents go and do the detailed work.
[00:01:50;14 - 00:01:54;18]
Kent Beck
Oh, Randy, my friend, it is wonderful to have you on Still Burning.
[00:01:55;22 - 00:02:03;26]
Kent Beck
Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here. Yeah, we've known each other for a long time. A long time. Okay, enough said about that.
[00:02:05;00 - 00:02:08;23]
Kent Beck
When did you first know that you were a geek by this definition?
[00:02:08;23 - 00:02:10;04]
Randy Shoup
Oh, wow.
[00:02:12;21 - 00:02:28;14]
Randy Shoup
That's interesting because my father was a geek by this definition. He worked at Xerox PARC and was an early computer scientist. He inspired an interest in math and computers for me. But actually, when I went to university, I was planning to be an international lawyer.
[00:02:29;22 - 00:02:48;05]
Randy Shoup
In high school, I'd done debate and you learn the political issues of the day. Right. And feel free to look it up. But I graduated high school in 1986 and college in 1990, so high to the Cold War. And what I thought I would do with my life, my dad, famous computer scientist, had lost great stuff.
[00:02:49;22 - 00:02:54;12]
Randy Shoup
I wasn't scared away as much as I thought that my talents were elsewhere.
[00:02:55;16 - 00:03:30;25]
Randy Shoup
And so long story short, I ended up getting a political science degree from Stanford, but I really love math and computers from my dad. And so we didn't have minors, so I ended up double majoring in what's now the data science major, mathematical and computational science. So like applied math, statistics, operations research, computer science. But that was the side gig. That was like for fun. Okay. Political science and international relations was like the mainline career. And I studied overseas in West Berlin. There was still a wall around it. Studied behind the iron curtain and crack out. So like I was into the East-West relations part.
[00:03:31;29 - 00:03:45;03]
Randy Shoup
I'd had some internships during college at Intel actually doing software engineering for them. It was a great way to make money and I enjoyed it. But like, again, not my career. It was fun, really fun. I enjoyed it. Not what I thought was my career.
[00:03:46;05 - 00:04:03;16]
Randy Shoup
And then after I graduated from college, I didn't want to go straight to grad school because I was going to do, which I ended up starting, a law and international relations program. Like that was the plan. But I spent two years working at Oracle as a software engineer. And then much to the chagrin and surprise of all of my buddies there,
[00:04:04;16 - 00:04:10;01]
Randy Shoup
I said, okay, I'm going to take the GRE, take the LSAT and like go do my international law stuff.
[00:04:11;03 - 00:04:19;26]
Randy Shoup
And I started the first, the first year of this four year program. JD MBA should be five years if you do it separately, but four years combined.
[00:04:20;29 - 00:05:05;20]
Randy Shoup
It was Stanford Law School and then the School of Advanced International Studies, which is a Johns Hopkins International Relations School in D.C. Started the first year of that four year program still on the track in the summer between the law school and the IR school. I took what's called a summer associate ship, basically an internship for lawyers. It was, should have been the perfect job and I hated it. So it was on Sandhill Road. So where all the VCs hang out, what they did was IP work. So patent prosecution, which you probably know, patent prosecution is getting patents. It's not litigating. It's not going into court, but it's prosecuting getting the patent for a geek, the most mind numbing and boring and terrible job.
[00:05:05;20 - 00:05:07;07]
Kent Beck
You don't get to create anything.
[00:05:07;07 - 00:05:26;28]
Randy Shoup
You don't get to create anything. All you do is write down the cool creation that the inventor did. So the inventors up there on the whiteboard described it, a wonderful, cool invention. And I'm like vibrating with excitement. Oh, did you think about this? Did you think about that? And they're like, no, no, no, you don't do that. You don't get to do that. You just write it down. And then you do bureaucratic infighting with the patent office to get the patent.
[00:05:28;17 - 00:05:51;20]
Randy Shoup
And then it's easy to get patents. Sorry folks, it is really easy, which way too, way more than should. I have 20, I should know. I should, I should deserve any of them. The only feedback you get is 30 years later if the patent is litigated, right? Like if it gets fought over, then okay, did I draw the meats and bounds correctly? And like when I had just come off of this like immediate gratification,
[00:05:53;02 - 00:06:21;06]
Randy Shoup
like very, not tactile in the physical sense, but like, you know, at the end of the day, you fix the bug, you've added the feature, you've done all this stuff. And I was having, I had so much fun there. Anyway, long story short, that was a crisis of identity for me that summer as an antidote to the law patent, boring patent law that I was doing. I was reading M. Mitchell Waldrop's book, Complexity and like chaos. Anyway, so like I was getting all well played. I was a fantastic book.
[00:06:22;11 - 00:06:58;29]
Randy Shoup
Complexity is equally good. That guy's from Santa Fe Institute, fantastic. And Mitchell Waldrop. So like it was only by immersing myself in these super geeky things that I like could kind of get through this summer, if that makes sense. And so by the end of it, it was like, you know what, it's very clear what I like, I knew it was very obvious what I needed to do, but it took me the whole summer to like get myself ready to say to everybody. And no one was mad, but just like, hey, everybody, the thing I've been saying I was going to do for 10 years, I'm not. And so I went back to Oracle and continued working as a software engineer. So I think that is when I realized I was a true geek.
[00:06:58;29 - 00:07:07;01]
Kent Beck
That's the highly creative part that you didn't have available to you. And then you realize, no, I can't live without this.
[00:07:08;01 - 00:07:12;26]
Randy Shoup
I never would have phrased it that way, but absolutely true, creative in the true sense of creating a thing.
[00:07:12;26 - 00:07:19;17]
Kent Beck
Right. Yes. You have some mental image. Yeah. Do some work. There's a thing we can make thoughts manifest.
[00:07:19;17 - 00:07:24;29]
Randy Shoup
Yes. Right. It's like, it's like Prometheus, right? Yeah.
[00:07:26;05 - 00:07:26;11]
Kent Beck
Yeah.
[00:07:27;23 - 00:07:41;14]
Kent Beck
And do you find that that background? So you've had a number of executive positions. Yeah. You find that background in politics and international relations. Is that playing into that?
[00:07:42;17 - 00:07:43;08]
Randy Shoup
A little bit.
[00:07:44;11 - 00:08:18;16]
Randy Shoup
You know, I don't have a counterfactual, right? So I don't have an, I don't have an alternate trajectory, but I will say that this, that learning about history and politics and international relations, there's strategic elements to it. Sure. There's understanding that human relations are an important thing. Sure. But I think a thing that the social sciences brings that we don't get enough of, I think in, when we, in technical disciplines is a true appreciation for nuance. There's things that are for sure wrong in the world. Yeah.
[00:08:19;27 - 00:08:21;01]
Randy Shoup
A lot right now.
[00:08:23;18 - 00:08:50;06]
Randy Shoup
Most of the world is, I know you and I feel this way, most of the world is gray. It's gray. And like, that's not wrong. That's just the world. And whereas I think a lot of people gravitate toward technical disciplines because there's a right and wrong. That is true at the bits and bytes level, but it is not true at the human level. And so there's something I, where I think you were making your question made me reflect on.
[00:08:51;13 - 00:09:01;17]
Randy Shoup
Yeah. And nuance, I think like it's understanding that there are multiple ways of achieving the same goal and that we do it collectively. I don't know.
[00:09:01;17 - 00:09:03;14]
Kent Beck
Yeah. And things bite back sometimes.
[00:09:03;14 - 00:09:38;21]
Randy Shoup
Sometimes things bite back. And the other thing just, I don't know, this is like a side, I like a 5%, 10% thing, but I've had the wonderful ability and privilege to go to conferences all over the world. And like being able, having an understanding of the history of those places and having some of the languages. I still have some German from when I was in Berlin and have always kept the Spanish up. So I don't know, like that, you know, that interests in like other countries, histories and politics and economics, it just makes you a fuller, more fully-firm human too.
[00:09:38;21 - 00:09:39;15]
Kent Beck
Yeah.
[00:09:40;16 - 00:09:43;09]
Kent Beck
I read a lot of history, still do. Yeah.
[00:09:46;00 - 00:09:50;23]
Kent Beck
And I think it provides perspective.
[00:09:52;01 - 00:10:18;06]
Kent Beck
We have a disaster on our hands. No, no, this is not a disaster. Right. Yeah, there's some bad consequences, but it's any number of really horrible things have happened in the last hundred years that make this not even a bump. So you can take a situation seriously without panicking. And if everybody perspective.
[00:10:18;06 - 00:10:21;06]
Randy Shoup
Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's not wrong.
[00:10:22;22 - 00:10:28;13]
Randy Shoup
In the current climate, I kind of wish I hadn't taken all the classes on authoritarianism and know the playbook,
[00:10:29;17 - 00:10:32;02]
Randy Shoup
but that's for another podcast, I think.
[00:10:33;24 - 00:10:35;20]
Randy Shoup
Probably. That's all good.
[00:10:36;22 - 00:10:47;10]
Kent Beck
No, I think that is part of the perspective. So we're talking on this podcast, we talked to geeks who had some experience.
[00:10:48;13 - 00:10:57;22]
Kent Beck
People react differently to that. Sometimes people will have some experience, they'll have some success and they never really want to touch it again.
[00:10:57;22 - 00:10:58;14]
Randy Shoup
Yeah.
[00:10:58;14 - 00:11:02;28]
Kent Beck
There's something about that detachment that I can understand it.
[00:11:05;09 - 00:11:14;25]
Kent Beck
I have lots of other interests too and would love to spend time on it, but also I'm still fascinated. My dad also was a programmer.
[00:11:16;27 - 00:11:29;06]
Kent Beck
There's an interesting dynamic there of trying to either live up to or not live up to what this father figure represented to you that I think we have in common. Yeah, for sure.
[00:11:30;28 - 00:11:32;24]
Kent Beck
That's also probably another podcast.
[00:11:32;24 - 00:11:34;01]
Randy Shoup
Yeah, we've talked about that.
[00:11:35;15 - 00:11:38;00]
Randy Shoup
That's the Group Therapy podcast.
[00:11:39;26 - 00:11:59;17]
Kent Beck
But unlike your father, my father kept his head down, never wanted to lead anything, never wanted to be prominent, never gave a speech in his life. You're prominent, you speak at conferences, you write, you're a public figure. How did that get started? Here you are.
[00:12:00;20 - 00:12:05;23]
Kent Beck
You're a failed law student at Oracle. I mean, that's two strikes against you right there.
[00:12:05;23 - 00:12:06;28]
Randy Shoup
There you go. Right. Absolutely.
[00:12:06;28 - 00:12:08;22]
Kent Beck
So how did that transition?
[00:12:08;22 - 00:12:10;20]
Randy Shoup
That's a great question.
[00:12:12;24 - 00:12:20;06]
Randy Shoup
Two answers to that. I'll give both. The first answer is I am very comfortable doing public speaking.
[00:12:21;09 - 00:12:33;16]
Randy Shoup
Again, I have no counterfactual, but seemingly more than most people, but I can trace it back to I started freshman year of high school doing public speaking. So I've been doing it for 43 years.
[00:12:35;17 - 00:13:14;12]
Randy Shoup
And I get nervous before talks, absolutely, just like everybody does. But I don't get nervous about the talking part. I get nervous about the content part. When I'm giving a new talk, I constantly do the imposter syndrome of like, oh, this is boring, this is obvious, and people are like, that was so great. I've never heard it said like that. It's one of those things where like, yeah, but this is going to be the time, right? And they're finally going to find us out. Yeah, those last 23 years. The last 43 years, no way, but 44th year for sure they're going to find me out. So part of it is, yes, that I've been doing public speaking for a long time and I'm very comfortable with it.
[00:13:14;12 - 00:13:18;09]
Kent Beck
So that keeps you from not speaking.
[00:13:19;18 - 00:13:26;15]
Randy Shoup
And I also affirmatively enjoy it. Okay. I also firmly enjoy it. So yeah, thanks for thanks for doing that.
[00:13:28;01 - 00:13:42;15]
Randy Shoup
I actually, I like conferences for many reasons. I get to hang out with cool people like yourself first and foremost, to be honest, like hanging out with other cool people is it next traveling to exotic places,
[00:13:43;23 - 00:13:44;19]
Randy Shoup
meeting interesting people,
[00:13:46;01 - 00:13:48;06]
Randy Shoup
talking to them, not like the army Rangers.
[00:13:49;22 - 00:14:00;28]
Randy Shoup
And I got that. I know you got that. I was always for you. I genuinely enjoy the presentation and there is a performative aspect to it. You know, you're, you're quite a good, quite a good performer.
[00:14:02;18 - 00:14:14;00]
Randy Shoup
And that's fun. There's an adrenaline rush and it's, and it's really fun. So that's one answer to that. The other answer is I got the, so I've been at eBay twice,
[00:14:15;09 - 00:15:02;12]
Randy Shoup
2004 to 2011 as an individual contributor, and then more recently, 2020, 2022 as the chief architect. And we could talk about either or neither, but the relevant thing for speaking at software conferences is that in 2006, when I was there the first time, another architect and I, we're both architects in the architecture team don't have an architecture team. Uh, we were the, we got to be, and we fought for this, right. We got to be the first people to go out and talk about things we were doing at eBay. And it's hard to remember now, but, um, way back in 2006, uh, eBay was absolutely on the cutting edge of, uh, distributed systems work. So equivalent, you know, uh, Yahoo, um,
[00:15:03;16 - 00:15:25;22]
Randy Shoup
Amazon at the same time, Google, uh, eBay, they were all had really similar, um, were discovered, co-discovering a bunch of the same, uh, scalability techniques. And we can talk about that if you're interested, but like there's some physics to scale to scaling. I'm like, once you've discovered the physics, they're the physics and we were all discovering the physics all at the same time.
[00:15:25;22 - 00:15:30;01]
Kent Beck
Because you were all operating at scales, nobody had ever,
[00:15:30;01 - 00:16:43;00]
Randy Shoup
nobody had ever done before. And again, lots of people, not just me. So it's not me bragging, but like, yes, that was what, like we had never, the humanity had never seen problems. I mean, like we're talking, you know, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people using this stuff and that puts strain on like, that's not one machine, right? That's racks upon racks upon racks of them. And now you've got distributed systems problems. Anyway, so, um, my buddy, Dan Pritchett and I, uh, for the architecture team got to give that first talk and it was standing room only in cover the auditorium in Palo Alto, who used to be a high school. Now it's a adult education place. Um, and it would like standing room only 200 people. And it wasn't, there was no. I don't know how they advertise it because it was, it was just some random, you know, special interest group. Uh, but 200 people were there and people talked about it. And so immediately we got invited to speak at the inaugural Qcon conferences, uh, started in London. They only could afford to take one of us. He was the elder person. So he, he got to go all good. Um, but that started me on this path of conference speaking. I'm talking of conference speaking and I never stopped.
[00:16:43;00 - 00:16:47;00]
Kent Beck
What was in it for eBay to have you revealing their secrets?
[00:16:47;00 - 00:17:15;25]
Randy Shoup
Yeah. Well, um, it was, it's in, that was the fight because, uh, many other companies at that time, including both Amazon and Google were super tightlifted about what they were doing and eBay also young hotshot company was very tightlipped about it. I think only Yahoo was really talking. Um, but, uh, what was in it for them? I mean, in retrospect, objectively, it's a recruiting tool. Uh, it makes them look hot and cool because it did.
[00:17:16;25 - 00:17:56;15]
Randy Shoup
Um, and I doubt anybody thought about this, but you know this very well yourself, but like formulating your thoughts in a way that is understandable by an external audience that doesn't work for you is a fantastic thinking tool. Absolutely fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. There's no, there's no better way to crystallize your own thinking than to try to explain it concisely and clearly to another person. Einstein said that, uh, fine men famously, how do you learn something? You try to explain it to somebody who's five, you fail, you learn some more, you try to get, you know, so, um, so it definitely helped.
[00:17:57;17 - 00:18:02;03]
Randy Shoup
Well, I'll say this, it helped me personally. It helped Dan personally, but also.
[00:18:03;06 - 00:18:05;16]
Randy Shoup
Pat, pat, pat. When I went back in 2020,
[00:18:06;26 - 00:18:16;10]
Randy Shoup
people that I was interviewing with, I thought I'd work with in the past is that, you know, the scalability talks that you gave when you were here last time, those are still part of the training. Like they what,
[00:18:18;07 - 00:18:26;00]
Randy Shoup
uh, I mean, again, the physics is all the same. Uh, but anyway, so it also helped them by like developing some internal training material.
[00:18:26;00 - 00:18:38;04]
Kent Beck
We talked a little bit earlier about this idea that, that for years now there's been a playbook. Yeah. And those scalability techniques were part of that playbook.
[00:18:39;19 - 00:19:29;19]
Kent Beck
People have been gotten really used to just being able to turn to some page in the playbook and you have a problem. There's the page, you apply the technique and way you go. But you were there as part of, of the team writing the playbook, which is a very different set of skills than the, than the people who apply it like it. Playbooks. Yeah. They're both challenging required creativity, but it's a different set of skills. Yeah. And one of the things I've noted about, about the introduction of augmented development techniques and tools is a lot of the playbook got wiped clean. And there are people who are just kind of panicked because they've never not had a playbook before. Yeah. And then I realized, okay, well, it's all right.
[00:19:30;22 - 00:19:34;19]
Kent Beck
You can write the next one, but it's a different set of skills.
[00:19:34;19 - 00:19:35;11]
Randy Shoup
Yeah.
[00:19:35;11 - 00:19:37;18]
Kent Beck
And I see people copying.
[00:19:39;05 - 00:19:56;16]
Kent Beck
Oh, well use TDD, right? One test, make it pass. Is that really the best thing? I don't know. It's a thing. Uh, but is it the best thing we given the tools that we have available to us now? Nobody knows. Yeah. Did you get bored once there was a playbook?
[00:19:57;19 - 00:20:21;27]
Randy Shoup
Oh, no. It's just as hard to execute a known playbook than it is to come up with it. I mean, boy, and I'm not doing this just to, you know, cause you're the guy that I'm talking to, but like extreme program, I explained 1999. Like I posted myself on LinkedIn. Hey, I just found this new book that teaches you how to do AI. It's called extreme programming explain.
[00:20:23;10 - 00:21:46;29]
Randy Shoup
And then you would not say otherwise, subsequently the continuous delivery book accelerates, uh, now frictionless. I mean, like there's a whole trajectory of very closely, we're team topologies, very closely related ideas, slightly, not taking anything away, slightly reformulated and set in different ways and applied to different things anyway. So yeah. Um, but Hey man, it is hard. You would go at other ways, other places in this conversation. That's fine. But it is pretty hard as an engineering leader to go in and go, y'all have heard about this playbook and you're doing about 1% of it. Uh, let's do the other 99. And the reason I know you know this, but I'm demonstrating I do. The reason why you had to write that playbook Kent is because it's not obvious. It is not, it's obvious to you. Okay. Yeah. That's okay. And you're, and you're weird in the most wonderful way, but like it is not intuitive that we shouldn't, I don't know, batch all our stuff up and like make, try really hard on it and like, you know, like there's a whole, all these like iterative, I mean, all these ideas, they're correct. And they are part of the physics of developing software, but at least to me, and I think demonstrably, let's say obviously demonstrably to most people, they're not obvious breaking things down into small units, checking your work all the time, how would, why would I write the test of a thing before I write the thing? That's crazy pants. Uh,
[00:21:48;24 - 00:21:58;21]
Randy Shoup
and once you start to see the, see what those techniques can do for you, they're revelatory. Uh, I'm not sure. I kind of went off from the, went off from the question.
[00:21:58;21 - 00:22:09;25]
Kent Beck
What do, so, so I get, I get really bored once there's a playbook. I am not the least bit interested. Oh, I'm ready to move on to the next thing. So I find it interesting that you like both.
[00:22:09;25 - 00:22:14;14]
Randy Shoup
Oh, uh, oh wow. Okay. That's where we're going. Fantastic. No, that's great. That's great.
[00:22:14;14 - 00:22:19;11]
Kent Beck
Saying it's easy to apply a label. I'm just saying that I personally get bored.
[00:22:19;11 - 00:23:15;06]
Randy Shoup
Yeah. And I'm, and I didn't, I didn't take it that for you to, I wasn't thinking you said that that's interesting because for me, I like to create the new thing, but also I am a more, I am a deductive thinker. The way my mind works and it's different. I think that most people are, it seems to be when I try to explain things to people is like state the principles and then here is how to apply them. And that's the way my, then my mind works. Like I see inductive reasoning is like, let's see a bunch of examples and derive from them the principle. And I can do both, but like give me a platonic ideal or whatever. And then like, I can, I can apply it in the real world. And that is, that to me is exciting. Like it is exciting. You're not saying otherwise, but for me. I don't get bored by executing somebody's playbook, especially yours.
[00:23:16;22 - 00:23:28;16]
Randy Shoup
I like doing good work. The application of a playbook is a joy to see it come to fruition. I love to cook and like,
[00:23:29;19 - 00:23:47;18]
Randy Shoup
it's just chemistry. Right. Cooking is only chemistry. There's nothing magic or whatever about it, but like it's pretty complicated chemistry. I like to do new things, but also it gives me joy to do the same things that I've done before and like execute it and like really, really nail it.
[00:23:47;18 - 00:23:56;01]
Kent Beck
So, so the part about execution that I really like is, is validating the leaps that I had to make to get there. Yeah.
[00:23:57;01 - 00:24:12;14]
Kent Beck
And so, uh, I, I, it's not that I'm disinterested in, or I want to be detached or in an ivory tower. No, no. But if I say, okay, here's a principle like small batches. Yeah.
[00:24:13;16 - 00:24:17;10]
Kent Beck
Let's apply that principle. Yeah. That seems to work out.
[00:24:17;10 - 00:24:18;23]
Randy Shoup
Okay. Check. Now I'm done.
[00:24:18;23 - 00:24:30;06]
Kent Beck
Check. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, now I want to move on to the next thing I get it, which I think, um, in some ways limits this, the spread of my ideas.
[00:24:31;12 - 00:24:36;22]
Kent Beck
I have met people who had one idea at the beginning of their career that was really.
[00:24:38;03 - 00:24:46;09]
Kent Beck
Novel, fascinating. And that is what they pushed for the next 30 years. And I would poke my eyes.
[00:24:46;09 - 00:24:46;27]
Randy Shoup
Yeah.
[00:24:46;27 - 00:24:50;11]
Kent Beck
Uh, I just, what a waste.
[00:24:50;11 - 00:24:52;16]
Randy Shoup
Yeah. For me, for me, for you.
[00:24:52;16 - 00:25:08;28]
Kent Beck
Yeah. I understand that people like it and, um, and so on, but once I have the idea, I applied on myself a few times. I figure out how to explain it, which means explaining it badly a bunch of times. Yes.
[00:25:10;01 - 00:25:21;08]
Kent Beck
Then I see people applying it. Then I see the, you know, the most exciting words in engineering, which are, it turns out, I see that it turns out phase of it.
[00:25:21;08 - 00:25:21;18]
Randy Shoup
Yeah.
[00:25:21;18 - 00:25:28;28]
Kent Beck
I adjust and then I don't, I don't need to ever give another TVD tutorial again as long as I live.
[00:25:28;28 - 00:25:38;03]
Randy Shoup
Wow. It's good to know that about yourself. I mean, you will, no, no, I mean, like you, it's lovely that we have, that are, there are people are motivated by different things. Thank God. Right. Thank God.
[00:25:38;03 - 00:25:38;16]
Kent Beck
Yeah.
[00:25:38;16 - 00:26:09;15]
Randy Shoup
And like you're an, you're an idea factory, right? And like somebody has to like the yin and the yang, like you need this, you need the, in order for your, you're saying this and I'm agreeing it, agree with it in order for your ideas to fully make the dent on the world that they should. They have to have to be applied by executed by other people. Yeah. Which, yay. Yeah. Yeah. And like, what if everybody was a kid and we were all coming up with an idea?
[00:26:09;15 - 00:26:12;01]
Kent Beck
So, or ultimately nothing would get done.
[00:26:12;01 - 00:26:22;03]
Randy Shoup
Nothing would get done or, or alternately, what if everybody was just an executor of an idea they could not come up with, we would get nothing interesting. Right. Right.
[00:26:22;03 - 00:26:26;24]
Kent Beck
And then along comes some kind of change. And you try to adapt.
[00:26:26;24 - 00:26:38;14]
Randy Shoup
Right. And I don't know, you know, we had, there's a couple of hundred billion, a couple of, what, two million years ago, there were six pieces of humans. Now there are one. So who knows what happened.
[00:26:39;16 - 00:26:40;02]
Randy Shoup
Yeah, exactly.
[00:26:41;08 - 00:26:43;02]
Kent Beck
Oh, yeah. We know what I'm saying.
[00:26:43;02 - 00:26:48;18]
Randy Shoup
And the evolution of biology, but that. I'm actually super fascinated by that. So that will be the third, the third edition of five.
[00:26:48;18 - 00:26:56;08]
Kent Beck
Yeah. Yeah. No, me, me too. Absolutely. What are you doing with the, with augmented development with the GE?
[00:26:56;08 - 00:27:28;03]
Randy Shoup
Yeah. Until this past week, I was the SPP of engineering for Thrive Online Grocery, about a hundred engineers. And I just, hired a buddy of mine for a long period. We've never worked together. A guy named Mike Winslow, Comcast for a long time, and then Amazon Music. And he's leading the team in, he's doing a bunch of things around AI augmentation that has an impact across the entire engineering team and the entire company. So for the company, is he's running dojos,
[00:27:29;11 - 00:27:43;16]
Randy Shoup
out of Target, American Airlines. There's a bunch of people who've done dojos for DevOps types of things, dojos for AI, so bring regular, not engineer humans and pair them with an engineered human and build a thing together.
[00:27:43;16 - 00:27:47;10]
Kent Beck
And I like that hybrid. Engineer humans.
[00:27:47;10 - 00:27:47;26]
Randy Shoup
Engineer humans.
[00:27:47;26 - 00:27:49;00]
Kent Beck
Not regular humans.
[00:27:49;00 - 00:27:53;19]
Randy Shoup
Yeah. Well, definitely. There's definitely not regular at engineer. There's no argument about that.
[00:27:54;19 - 00:28:43;14]
Randy Shoup
That's the important distinction we're drawing here. But in any of, but, and those have been fabulously successful. Like as we record this, like we've just been doing it for a couple of weeks and they've been like, everybody's so excited. Like the legal team is excited about stuff that they built, the merchandising team that buys the food, they're excited. I mean, like everybody's super excited. Also separately in terms of specifically AI, AI augmentation of software. I know you know well, it's all about the context and bounding the genie. Like how can we like keep the genie within the bounds that we would like? And partly that's spec driven in the forward direction, partly that's eval and adversarial stuff in the, in the kind of backward pushing direction. And we're doing both, but I love that it's genie because these, these guys named this knowledge graph work genome.
[00:28:44;15 - 00:29:23;09]
Randy Shoup
And so the idea is to like come up again, to come up with the, I don't know, can't say canonical, a collective description to the best of our knowledge of what does the product actually do? Cause like it's 12 years old and we have 12 year old software and lots of people, you know, don't even know, including the people who own the, own those areas. Uh, collected, connected with how the software behaves. So like a, you know, like a knowledge base of that we can use to, um, for context for spec stuff and then, uh, separately working on a harness for doing eval to make sure things are correct.
[00:29:23;09 - 00:29:34;07]
Kent Beck
So are you, uh, falling into the, I'll say it negatively side project trap. Where it's just so easy to start stuff. You start.
[00:29:35;12 - 00:29:45;24]
Randy Shoup
I don't personally. So, uh, here's, here's where maybe I, I, you have to take away my, my geek credentials, I am a Luddite in my personal life.
[00:29:45;24 - 00:29:46;07]
Kent Beck
Okay.
[00:29:46;07 - 00:29:49;29]
Randy Shoup
So I came very late to having cell phones. Now I can't live without it.
[00:29:51;00 - 00:29:51;06]
Randy Shoup
Uh,
[00:29:52;10 - 00:30:45;20]
Randy Shoup
I, when I'm, when I'm at work, I like love the industry level distributed. Like, I love that. I love playing at the edge of that. Uh, and then when I'm at home, like I'm not technical at all. So I have so many friends are like, Oh, I'm, uh, got my agent to do this. I even do them and like, great. Good for you. Like what I am home, not at work. Like I can, I'm going to the farmer's market, cooking stuff, hang out with my son. Uh, and there's no judgment in there. That's just like, that's, I have, I have tried to get myself to be excited about side project, technical side projects. And I just, I just can't like, it's enough for me. Kind of like what you were saying, like it's enough for me that that's my day job and more than half my waking hours. Yeah.
[00:30:46;29 - 00:31:36;25]
Randy Shoup
For me, I don't need it to be more. Um, but at work, absolutely people are, um, I mean, it's not even wrong, right? A thing. And I know you know this, like this is Jevons paradox. Now that essentially cognition is near free. Uh, now there are all these things that we would do with cognition that did not beat that wasn't, we're not economically viable and now they are. So like you, you know, I know you know this Jevons was an English economist in the 1850s, 1860s. He was talking about coal and like, Oh, we made coal, we made the extraction of coal, connects cheaper. Does that mean we spent less on coal? No, we actually in net spent more on coal because now. Coal at one pound instead of 10 pounds or whatever is like now it's now there are all these other uses for coal that we never had before.
[00:31:36;25 - 00:31:45;19]
Kent Beck
What's a tool that you would like to have that you've never been able to buy build?
[00:31:45;19 - 00:31:46;20]
Randy Shoup
Oh, wow.
[00:31:48;01 - 00:31:54;18]
Randy Shoup
Wish I were more creative. Um, I will say that this is a tool that Mike just built, uh,
[00:31:56;00 - 00:32:05;04]
Randy Shoup
which is a really good, um, let's look at the, at a team's, uh,
[00:32:06;05 - 00:32:11;19]
Randy Shoup
execution and not to blame them, but to help them, where are the bottlenecks?
[00:32:13;06 - 00:32:50;10]
Randy Shoup
And okay, here's the, I dunno, rate of feature production, rate of bug fixes. Uh, and he's not a lot about a lot about this and it's fantastic. Like you look at this sort of dashboard of, uh, you know, the whole overall engineering organization or team by team, and it becomes so, you know, pictures is a thousand, you know, pictures with a thousand words. Um, and it's just so evocative to see how, Oh, like it takes five days to do that thing. Well, wow, let's work on that. You know, um,
[00:32:51;12 - 00:33:30;13]
Randy Shoup
I'm a very visual person. So I guess, I guess if I had to, yeah, to answer more generally your question, if I could have a visual representation, so I'm able to keep a lot of stuff in my head, a lot of abstraction. Uh, but the only way I can do that is like construct my own visualization in my own brain, but I can't communicate it. So if there were, if there were a way, so like, okay, let's like, let's visualize all the bottlenecks and we have visuals. But like as an executive, like show me the problems, do you know what I mean? And show me it in a visual way.
[00:33:32;01 - 00:33:53;11]
Kent Beck
Okay. Quite hand wavy, but okay. Well, that's a business model already for somebody to go make one of those. Yeah, for sure. Or, or lots of people to make them. That's one of the beauties now is that it is easy to start things. Yeah. Um, it's just as expensive to maintain them as ever, I think.
[00:33:53;11 - 00:33:54;29]
Randy Shoup
Absolutely it is.
[00:33:54;29 - 00:33:58;04]
Kent Beck
Uh, but, but that initial, yeah.
[00:33:58;04 - 00:34:15;16]
Randy Shoup
Yeah. The, uh, uh, the admonition to limit whip is one that I've been saying a lot in my career, but like, I have to keep saying it a lot, a lot. Yeah. Like, oh, I'm working on these five things. Like, okay, how about work on these two things, get them done, and you can work on
[00:34:15;16 - 00:34:17;08]
Kent Beck
the other, the other three.
[00:34:18;09 - 00:34:29;06]
Randy Shoup
It's not the same thing, but my buddy, Martin Thompson, who's a performance, like absolute rock star guru likes to say, uh, when you show me, you can use one thread, I'll give you another.
[00:34:30;08 - 00:34:35;15]
Randy Shoup
And he's got a high bar for that.
[00:34:35;15 - 00:34:43;25]
Kent Beck
Um, so you mentioned that, that, uh, your time at thrive was coming to an end. Yeah. What happens next?
[00:34:43;25 - 00:34:52;27]
Randy Shoup
Uh, that remains to be seen. When, when this podcast is aired, recorded, uh, I'll probably be, uh, I'm certainly be doing something else.
[00:34:54;01 - 00:34:54;07]
Randy Shoup
Um,
[00:34:55;16 - 00:35:21;24]
Randy Shoup
uh, it is highly likely that I will take it interim role to help, uh, my buddies at circle CI be more effective. So there was a confluence. I've been coaching their CTO and their principal engineer, uh, for a number of years and I brought them their second principal engineer out of my network. Um, and there was just a confluence events of events of, uh, they have a Randy shaped hole and Randy's available.
[00:35:22;27 - 00:35:37;21]
Randy Shoup
Um, and I really, I really like what they're doing. I like what they have been doing. I've been a customer of their several times and I really like where they're going, only some of which people know outside. Okay. So, uh, and just very generally without any specifics, very generally.
[00:35:39;01 - 00:36:25;01]
Randy Shoup
Correctly as many companies, they are really working hard to try to see what is the new agentic augmented team structure, project structure, et cetera. And not just for their customers, although that's obviously important for themselves. Like they have, they've taken, uh, I mean the CTO himself who could do just about anything, it's fantastic. Rob Zuber, uh, is leading one of those little tiny two to three person, like going absolute blazing light speed fast. There's another one also blazing light speed fast in a different complimentary direction for what they're doing. Uh, and I will help to see how we can get everybody else, uh,
[00:36:26;02 - 00:37:17;03]
Randy Shoup
kind of aligned with that. I don't even know what that means, but, uh, I'll be excited to do that. And then more in the future, again, I guess you put things out in the world and maybe they happen. Um, I've always wanted to work overseas. I mean, again, international, international law and international relations. As I said, I lived in, in, um, West Berlin and then in Poland and college, and I just never had the opportunity to work, uh, overseas. Really. I've never, never done it. Um, I love the travel for conferences and that, that really, that really, uh, scratches the niche for me. Um, but I think it might be time. Uh, my son's in university. He's loving, loving, loving his, uh, his mechanical engineering career at Yale. Just finished his first year. Uh, so I'm an empty nester and like maybe ready to do, maybe do other stuff. So we'll see what happens.
[00:37:17;03 - 00:37:20;13]
Kent Beck
Okay. How much longer can you see yourself doing this?
[00:37:20;13 - 00:37:38;28]
Randy Shoup
Oh, that's a great question. I was literally having that conversation this morning on my hike with my, my friend, Hannah on onion way low this morning. Um, I think, I think it is not wrong for me to think I am two thirds of the way through my life and I'm 57. So that would take me to 85.
[00:37:40;13 - 00:38:32;17]
Randy Shoup
Uh, that's my lifetime, not necessarily my work time, but I genuinely enjoy what I do. Like I'm not the kind of person that I'm going to like you pry the pen or whatever that keyboard out of my cold, dead hands. Cause I have lots of fun stuff that I want to do with my life. And I, but I don't think I'm ready and I think, I don't think I will be ready for a substantial period of time to set it aside completely. Like there's a, there's a glide path, you know, of like, you know, moving into more advisory roles and, you know, and so on and helping out in various, in various ways, basically enabling, you know, other organizations and sort of the next generation, if you like. And I do very much enjoy that kind of stuff. So I can, I can see myself doing that, but, um, but I don't know, I'm definitely not done, I haven't put enough of a debt in the world. Like there's still more debt to put. Um, and I think I got a couple more decades in need.
[00:38:32;17 - 00:38:53;09]
Kent Beck
So, so last question. What about this, uh, wildly changing situation we find ourselves in and you can interpret that as the world technology, whatever you'd like. Okay. Uh, what about that scares you? What about that wakes you up at night?
[00:38:55;10 - 00:38:57;03]
Randy Shoup
Oh, geez. I told you,
[00:38:58;24 - 00:39:02;00]
Randy Shoup
Hey man, do you want the whole list or just the top 150?
[00:39:03;19 - 00:39:16;28]
Randy Shoup
Uh, I'll try to give you only a small note. I am, I am cautiously optimistic about the future of our country, our society, our planet,
[00:39:18;02 - 00:39:21;28]
Randy Shoup
but every one of them is under threat in ways we've never seen before.
[00:39:22;29 - 00:39:23;11]
Randy Shoup
Uh,
[00:39:25;00 - 00:39:45;06]
Randy Shoup
and that's a challenge. That's a big old challenge. And I don't know, as humans, we've demonstrated that the only way forward is through and what I mean by that is to the extent that there's, there will still be democracy,
[00:39:46;10 - 00:39:47;02]
Randy Shoup
modern civilization,
[00:39:48;02 - 00:39:48;21]
Randy Shoup
and a planet,
[00:39:49;22 - 00:40:18;07]
Randy Shoup
uh, habitable planet. It is because we have used technology to do it. Like it, it all exists, man. I know you know this. Like if we would just take a step back and go, Hey, what if we just did solar? What if we just did renewable? What if we did this and that? What if, you know, and it does not need to be pie in the sky. You do not need to be, there's no majority of it in the statement. Sorry, for the scientists. You do not need to have a communitarian, uh,
[00:40:19;18 - 00:40:54;20]
Randy Shoup
I mean, it's not communism style approach in order for there to be fairness and equity in the world and in order for these problems to be solved. I mean, the problem of climate, the problem of democracy in America, the problem of what are we going to do? I mean, AI is this big old power. It's going to, I am confident in the long run for Jevons paradox that it will create more jobs and there will still be not just the same number of engineers, but more, uh, and also with every revolution comes major disruption of the actual humans that are right there. Like in 1900,
[00:40:56;01 - 00:41:40;18]
Randy Shoup
80% of the United States population was doing agriculture. Now it is two to 3%. If you went to somebody in 1900, a farmer in 1900 and said, Hey, guess what happens? 78% of you all are not going to be doing farming in 126 years. That person would have said, what a dystopia. How could you, right? Like it wouldn't have been a hundred percent wrong, but, but seriously, like we have gone, we've gone so far in ways that that person would not have could have imagined cause Jules Verne, but like would have been hard for everybody at that time to imagine if you see what I mean. Um, I guess I'm jumping a little bit around, but I would, what, what keeps me up at night is that we don't have, uh,
[00:41:43;22 - 00:42:41;06]
Randy Shoup
is that we don't buckle down and solve these things. We don't make it possible for ourselves to solve these things. Yeah. And if I could just say one more thought, and this is the technologist in me and the political scientist is again, we have learned over and over again that you can't like shame people into doing right stuff. Right. And like, I don't even, from a psychological safety perspective, although I believe that, uh, but just simply like making people feel bad about hurting the environment is not going to make them save the environment. Instead, you have to make it easy and good and better for everybody. Like we have to all feel like if we were going to electrify everything, solarize everything, blah, blah, blah. Like it has to come with it's better. It's like objectively better for all of us. And I think a lot of people who honestly would share my political beliefs in every other way, like don't fully see that they don't fully see that there's this.
[00:42:42;07 - 00:42:50;28]
Randy Shoup
That the only economic forces that are, that you can really harness are those forces of like, I need life to be better for me and my kids.
[00:42:51;28 - 00:43:07;14]
Randy Shoup
Uh, and like, there's no concept of like, Hey, let's go deprive ourselves into saving stuff. Like, I wish we had that morality, but nobody has done wrong. This doesn't hurt, you know, not enough people. I hope that made a modicum of sense.
[00:43:08;22 - 00:43:12;04]
Kent Beck
So, well, I, I, you've clearly thought about it. Yeah.
[00:43:13;28 - 00:43:15;08]
Randy Shoup
Whether I can communicate it or not.
[00:43:15;08 - 00:43:18;11]
Kent Beck
Well, that's the, uh, you got to explain it over and over.
[00:43:18;11 - 00:43:22;19]
Randy Shoup
Oh, there you go. That's it. Right. Uh, that was not for the five year old. So like, I clearly, I need to do,
[00:43:22;19 - 00:43:24;22]
Kent Beck
I'll let you work on that.
[00:43:24;22 - 00:43:25;14]
Randy Shoup
That's right. I'll come.
[00:43:25;14 - 00:43:30;01]
Kent Beck
What a pleasure to have you here. I really appreciate it. I appreciate your friendship.
[00:43:30;01 - 00:43:32;25]
Randy Shoup
Thanks, man. I love you, man. Thank you. Right. Love you too.