Kent Beck
“For each desired change, make the change easy (warning: this may be hard), then make the easy change.”
Kent Beck hates writing biographies. Guitarist, singer, storyteller, walker, poker player, programmer, artist. Original signer of the Agile Manifesto, author of the Extreme Programming book series, rediscoverer of Test-Driven Development, and inspiring keynote speaker. Helps geeks feel safe in the world.
Jessica Kerr
After twenty years in software development, Jess believes that we are doing more than building. More than crafting. We are forming the systems that make up reality. Much of the world we live in, the world we see and the world we act in, is made of software these days.
What we develop matters. And more: the way we develop it matters. It matters for how it changes us. Software lets us form complex systems faster, and adapt them faster, than any human-made material of the past. This means we can learn how to make better systems.
For this, we have to learn how to see those systems. Then we have to practice changing them in small ways, and consciously looking at what happens.
Jess is known for her keynotes, blog, and tweets. She podcasts on Greater than Code and Arrested Devops.
Currently, she spends much of her time building symmathesies through Industrial Logic. She has worked at startups (Atomist, Stripe, Outpace) and enterprises (Ford, Bayer, Sprint). She’s programmed in and spoken at conferences about Java, Scala, Clojure, TypeScript, Ruby, and Elm.
Jess lives in St. Louis, MO with two children who invent worlds and draw characters with superpowers, and two cats who meow and knock over water glasses.