Kent Beck

It isn't just about electric planes: Rolls-Royce were trying to be G.E. and failing.

slashing divisions such as R2 Factory, an in-house artificial intelligence software unit, and a direct air carbon capture project.
Rolls-Royce said it would cut 2,500 management and administration jobs.
The next head to roll is its electrical business, which develops propulsion systems for flying taxis and other aircraft.

Did Rolls-Royce think they were a VC/incubator for inventions with multi-decade payoffs? Tough market.

Rolls-Royce continue to develop for the nuclear power market - I'm guessing driven by government/military money. Compare to GE Hitachi: https://www.gevernova.com/nuclear

Then again, looking at the General Electric website makes me want to short GE!
Read and weep their AI initiative to develop buzzwords: https://www.ge.com/research/initiative/industrial-ai
Or the bigger picture:

Q: What is GE's mission/purpose statement?
A: GE's newly defined Purpose is “We rise to the challenge of building a world that works.”
Q: What industries does GE operate in?
A: GE has long been a leader in Power, Renewable Energy and Aerospace. Today, GE also leads in delivering solutions across Additive Manufacturing, materials science and data analytics.

Financially, a basket of options is worth more than an option on a basket (RR share price). https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/decisions-decisions-or-why-baskets-of-options-dominate-9ac63658b593

CEO of Gitpod here - we just announced a $25m Series A last month (https://www.gitpod.io/blog/future-of-software-cdes), so not looking to get acquired anytime soon ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

On the market landscape: the whole market around CDEs (https://www.gitpod.io/cde) is in its infancy. Our largest competition is local development. We believe that unlike for other creative workflows the convenience threshold for development in the cloud has not (yet) been crossed. We are moving away from self hosted to execute faster on what we always wanted: from history-dependent cobbled local development environments to consistently reproducible, instant, ephemeral Cloud Development Environments (CDEs). You can think of CDEs (https://www.gitpod.io/cde) as our product north star.

Other links:

- How Redmonk looks at the market https://redmonk.com/jgovernor/2022/12/01/the-year-of-the-cloud-development-environment/
- Kent Beck https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/cloud-development-environments-tame-complexity-by-reducing-state-4a154ea7959f (full disclosure: Kent invested in the meantime into the company)

Reminds me of Kent Beck's 3x [0] (there are also video presentations online).

So from that perspective you're describing the first two "explore" and "expand". The third is also interesting "extract" where a project reduces risk over everything else.

Both are missing the fourth part of a lifecycle. If we take the 4x analogy further (which is a popular video game genre) then there would be a "extinguish" phase. In a 4x video game that is where you take over the whole play area (map etc.), essentially by bullying out or assimilating the other factions.

In the real world this is also kind of true (see Amazon as a popular example in tech, or price dumping strategies practiced by Pharma and other large industries). But it is generally frowned upon as it hurts the economy and erodes social contracts. Also for most projects and organizations it isn't feasible to do so. So the "extinguish" part could be understood as "gracefully fading out" from which new cycles can be grown.

[0] https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/fast-slow-in-3x-explore-expand-extract-6d4c94a7539

I highly recommend Kent Beck's keynote talk from RailsConf 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aApmOZwdPqA (or if you prefer, a more recent blog post with a similar message): https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/accountability-in-software-development-375d42932813. Software development is hard, and it's easy to do things the wrong way. The thing to do is figure out how to do things that give you confidence you're doing things the right way.

In some ways, it can look bad for someone in leadership, like a CTO, to get called out for not doing things the right way. At the same time though, if you and the leadership in your company have hired the right engineers working with you, even if you are the CTO hopefully people working with you know more about specific areas than you do, and as CTO you can help make sure that things fit together. So what if you get feedback on how to do things better? You as CTO have a chance to set an example to others on the team for how to receive feedback constructively.

Note that this post is talking about the idea as a follow-on to the idea of automatically running tests and then generating a commit, from every filesystem-observable change (https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/limbo-on-the-cheap-e4cfae840330).

I'm sure your (manual) commits keep together the changes to the code and the matching changes to the test that keep the test green—but your Ctrl+S'es probably don't. In this strange workflow, the tests are required to be green every time you press Ctrl+S; and any time you press Ctrl+S and the tests aren't green, everything you did since the last time the tests were green disappears from the worktree.

Oh my, Larry was only 74? That is far too young.

We were friends, off and on. Perhaps somewhat "off" after I stole his girlfriend. (In my defense, it was her idea!) But that was 35 years ago, and all was forgiven (and hopefully forgotten) in more recent years.

Here is Larry's Smalltalk article from the August 1981 BYTE, complete with a photo of the famous T-shirt that a mutual friend made for him:

DON'T
MODE ME
IN

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08/page/n103/mode/1up

A couple of other good articles:

https://gizmodo.com/1841787408

https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/larry-tesler-1945-2020-b910429f12eb