Java Magazine, Nov/Dec 2016
ORACLE COM JAVAMAGAZINE NOVEMBER DECEMBER 2016 36 junit 5 Binstock I understand you work at Facebook these days What is it that you do there Beck I am focused on engineer education My oficial title is technical coach and that means what I do most days is pair program and talk with engineers Binstock Are these typically seasoned engineers or those just recently entering the field Beck All sorts What I find if I coach a bunch of engineers at a given level Ill start spotting patterns among whatever bottleneck theyre hitting and frankly I get bored telling the same stories and addressing the same issues So Ill write a course that addresses those issues We have an organization thats very very good at cranking lots of engineers through the course So we have courses for new college graduates we have a course for people making the transition to technical leadership we have a course for technical leaders hired in from the outside because Facebook culture is very very diferent and if you are used to leading by giving commands that other people obey thats not going to work Binstock When youre working in a place like Facebook youre probably seeing a diferent kind of scaling dimension than most developers encounter So what changes there If I were to ask how your review of programming was informed by the concerns of scaling what would you say is diferent Beck Its a great question because its really hard to boil it down so I can give you some specifics Logging is far more important Performance in some cases is far more important A tiny little performance regression can bring the entire site down Because were trying to operate very eficiently in terms of capital and also in terms of CPUs and bandwidth and everything theres very little headroom sometimes So for certain teams performance theres a lot to lose as well as a little bit to gain and thats I think unusual Logging is all about being able to debug after something horrible goes wrong In classic extreme programming style you arent going to need it YAGNI so you dont write it Well here you are going to need it so you do write it Even if you dont end up ever needing it you still need it Binstock I see Beck You need the option of being able to post mortem a service and that options worth a lot in a way that I just had never seen before Binstock How about when you commit code to the main trunk I would imagine ANDREW BINSTOCK Interview with Kent Beck The parent of JUnit and creator of TDD discusses programming and testing and how his views on testing have evolved Kent Beck inventor of extreme programming and cocreator of JUnit His work led to the PHOTOGRAPH BY BOB ADLER GETTY IMAGES popularity of developer based testing
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