Jan 2020 – Present · 6 yrs 4 mos · California, United States · Remote

• People ask "how did you think of that?" Turns out I often have an answer — little tricks of thinking I picked up along the way. I call them Thinkies. ~90 collected so far, sharing one each week. Hosted the first Thinkie World Congress in 2025 to explore this with others.

Apr 2019 – Sep 2022 · 3 yrs 5 mos · San Francisco, California

• Managed team creating a service to pay and file taxes across all states and tax agencies
• Revised performance evaluation to emphasize impact and outcome over effort and output with colleague Nimrod Hoofien.
• Helped sort out a mountain of technical debt with techniques from Tidy First?: An Empirical Practice of Software Design.
• Coached high-potential engineers, designers, product managers, and executives.
• The money quote is from Flee (CSO Frederick Lee), "Kent is the Rick Rubin of software engineering."

Jan 2017 – Present · 9 yrs 4 mos · California, United States · Remote

• Writing about software design for 120,000+ subscribers. Currently drafting Tidy Together, the third book in the Empirical Software Design series. Software design is an exercise in human relationships.

Jan 2011 – Feb 2018 · 7 yrs 1 mo

• Responsible for preserving, enhancing, and explaining Facebook's unique engineering culture. Coaching students twice as likely to be promoted as their non-coached peers. Studies and teaches teamwork. Explains Facebook's culture to the outside world.
• Researches Facebook's software engineering process through data mining of code repositories and code review activity.
• Developed and optimized a C++/Thrift server to handle all messaging traffic.

Oct 2010 – Apr 2017 · 6 yrs 6 mos

• I help with recruiting, project planning and tracking, and training senior staff. Training includes code camps here in Oregon and remote mentoring.

Jan 2004 – Present · 22 yrs 4 mos

• Once I sold my first piece I got to call myself a professional. I have a series of abstracts dubbed "what the inside of Kent's head looks like", painted in acrylic on mirrors. I have a series of nightscapes painted eglo mise acrylic on glass.

Jan 2004 – Jan 2008 · 4 yrs

• Supported sales and marketing and reviewed product direction.
• Helped close $100K deal with Japanese utility by developing relationship with board chairman.
• Presented series of workshops in Europe establishing Agitar’s presence in the market and contributing to €700K in first year sales.
• Presented JUnit 4 to SRO crowd at JavaOne with Agitar founder Alberto Savoia.

Jan 2000 – Jan 2007 · 7 yrs

Jan 1999 – Present · 27 yrs 4 mos · Lugano, Switzerland

Oct 1997 – Present · 28 yrs 7 mos

• I developed JUnit, initially with Erich Gamma and now with David Saff (now programmer emeritus). JUnit is an open-source tool to encourage programmers to write automated tests.
• JUnit embedded in all Java development environments.
• Winner of JavaWorld Editor’s Choice (3 times), JDJ Editor’s Choice Award, Java Pro Magazine's Reader's Choice Award.
• JUnit architecture translated into more than thirty programming languages.

Sep 1992 – Present · 33 yrs 8 mos

• Proprietor of independent consulting company: marketing, sales, bookkeeping, and delivery. Developed, marketed, and sold development tools. Developed, delivered, and licensed training materials.
• Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change and Test-Driven Development: By Example won Jolt Productivity Award.
• Original signer of the Agile Manifesto.
• Keynote speaker at many major conferences including OOPSLA, RailsConf, QCon, JAOO, EclipseWorld, SD Best Practices. Presented on all continents (less Antarctica).

Jan 1989 – Jan 1992 · 3 yrs

• Developed the client user interface for debugging programs on a 16K processor SIMD supercomputer.
• Developed interactive data visualization.
• With compiler groups and debugger server group, pioneered incremental statement-level profiling of optimized Fortran and C code.

Jan 1987 – Jun 1989 · 2 yrs 5 mos

• Responsible for productizing Smalltalk and researching next-generation programming languages.
• Lead developer for Macintosh Smalltalk (cancelled before release).
• On team of eight led by Alan Kay developing and evaluating Playground, a programming language for middle-school students.
• Wrote cult classic Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, an influence on Java’s collection classes.
• Program chair for OOPSLA-89.

Jul 1984 – Jan 1987 · 2 yrs 6 mos

• Researched dynamic languages.
• Applied patterns to software development with Ward Cunningham.
• Received US patent 4,885,717 for “A System for Graphically Representing Operation of Object-oriented Programs.”
• Helped popularize CRC cards.
• Developed the HotDraw drawing editor framework, and early influence of Java’s AWT and Swing.