How I came to write “Tidy First?” tl;dr it took 18 years

https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/how-i-came-to-write-tidy-first

by KentBeck • 3 years ago

173 17 3 years ago

tidyfirst.substack.com

catskul2• 3 years ago

What's "Tidy First"? Is this a book I should have heard of?

The author of this piece is Kent Beck, who has written on software before. https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/25211.Kent_Beck

He is one of the "Agile Manifesto" people: his name is on this page https://agilemanifesto.org/

His books are rightly well-known. He appears to be discussing his upcoming new book. It doesn't seem to be out yet.

scrame• 3 years ago

ooooh. yeah he wrote the book on Test Driven Development.

I had the same question initially, I thought tidy first was one of those home keeping books.

nextos• 3 years ago

I think this link to an event his publisher is organizing discusses some relevant context to understand the post: https://www.oreilly.com/live-events/software-architecture-ho...

neilv• 3 years ago

I managed to attend a few book-signings of great authors (Salman Rushdie, Richard Dawkins, and, long ago, Beverly Cleary), but would kill for this Yourdon-Constantine one, as well as the story behind it.

I actually worked for a CASE vendor that started by building tools to apply Yourdon et al.'s Structured Analysis and Structured Design to important systems, in mil/aerospace/datacom. (I was lucky to be the teen mascot on our full-lifecycle evolution of those tools, in the Portland division, and then on an R&D team at HQ for next-gen OO CASE.)

Yourdon also collaborated with Peter Coad on a pair of books for OO development.

To this day, I still find Yourdon et al.'s DFDs (from Structured Analysis) to be one of the first and most powerful tools for eliciting process/system understanding, from business people and techies alike, even if they've never seen it. Put loosely, it seems half of all business/org problems lately could be solved by leading people through a DFD exercise.

masfuerte• 3 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data-flow_diagram

dragonwriter• 3 years ago

Yeah, Yourdon DFDs (with something like fairly low-formality Cockburn-style use cases as the minispecs for process bubbles) äre an awesome tool for understanding and communicating about systems, and are super accessible.

hnbad• 3 years ago

Richard Dawkins

The Selfish Gene was amazing to me when I first read it in the early 2000s and after reading The God Delusion I dove into his back catalog and followed his publications for a while but it honestly felt like throughout his books he largely kept re-hashing the same ideas with little novel insight, only occasionally refining his rhetoric or looking for new ways to present what he had already said. In retrospect, I struggle to even define what distinguished one book from another when it comes to everything he published after The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype.

It felt a bit like he took the "publish or perish" approach from academia to publishing. It also feels like his decline in academic publishing (according to Wikipedia, his last academic papers seem to have been published in 2004 and his last popular articles in 2008) correlates with his infatuation with his then-celebrity status during the New Atheism wave and his eventual descent into anti-progressivism (or more charitably: Twitter drama) and his hyperfixation on Islam (which incidentally mirrors the development of a lot of more mundane content creators who got their start in "debunking" creationists and in some cases have come full (semi?) circle to Christian conservatism and anti-atheism).

chmod600• 3 years ago

Off-topic, but the writing style seems to use "&" excessively. Did anyone else find that disruptive?

dang• 3 years ago

Some people like it. I would find it annoying except they used to do it all the time in the 18th century and it's kind of fun that an old convention came back.

codetrotter• 3 years ago

Some people like it & I would find it annoying except they used to do it all the time in the 18th century & it's kind of fun that an old convention came back.

FT&FY

plorkyeran• 3 years ago

Obviously it's fallen out of fashion, but it is/was just a shorthand way of writing "and" & it used to be pretty normal to just use it every time. It's not really something you can use "excessively"; either you write "and" as "&" or you don't.

ojbyrne• 3 years ago

I got to meet Ed Yourdon several years ago (he came to interview me, amazingly). No one else at the company knew who he was.

throwaway2729• 3 years ago

Could be a useful book for ChatGPT to read

dnrvs• 3 years ago

is Tidy First? a book I can read or does it require reading the substack in reverse order?

Jtsummers• 3 years ago

It will be a book.

How I came to write “Tidy First?” tl;dr it took 18 years

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