At 50, joining Facebook, Kent found a company running a massive, stable, fast-growing site while barely doing any unit testing at all — and when he offered to teach a TDD class at a hackathon, it got zero signups, unlike the classes on either side.

Kent Beck describes discovering at Facebook that a hugely successful, fast-scaling company cared nothing for TDD — his hackathon class on it drew zero interest — pushing him to relearn engineering from scratch. ✦ AI generated

Kent Beck · The Pragmatic Engineer · 2026-07-01 · original ↗

At Facebook, Kent found a company that barely did any form of unit testing, while running a massive, stable, and fast-growing site. He signed up to teach a TDD class at a hackathon — he wrote the book, after all! The classes either side of his in the schedule both filled up, but the TDD class got zero signups, not even a pity one.

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