Meet Beck.

This isn’t Beck the singer-songwriter or Jeff Beck the guitarist. This isn’t even Kent Beck the agile thought leader and creator of XP.

This much less famous Beck is a back-end C# programmer. He’s worked on high-volume mission-critical transaction-processing systems. He’s a proud practitioner of “test-driven development”, but for those in the know, his approach tends toward outside-in TDD or ATDD. He secretly covets BDD, but wonders if not using Gherkin disqualifies him. He also has ADHD, but that’s a different topic.

Beck believes in the Agile Manifesto. He gives a thumbs up to the SOLID principles, while privately wondering how many folks mean the same thing by “open-closed” or could use “Liskov substitution” in a sentence.

Beck’s a fan of DevOps — he’s experienced the joy of working in an environment with good CI/CD tooling — but while he’s benefited from that stuff, he hasn’t set it up himself. (This is bringing us closer to the point of our story.)

Another thing Beck hasn’t done is much front-end development. It wasn’t needed for his day-to-day, and the few things he did on the side were quickly out-of-date. WinForms, WPF, XAML, HTML, ASP, CSS, ASP.NET, ASPX (those last two are the same, right?), ASP.NET Core, HTML5, JavaScript, Silverlight, MVC, MVVM, Razor, IIS, Azure. And that’s just stuff that intersects the Microsoft space — we’ll get to the other guys later. All of those were potentially interesting at the time. Some are obsolete now. Some are downright disdained.

Yes, all learning is good learning… but for Beck there was never a compelling reason to devote spare time to learning those, as opposed to, say, guitar, or obscure history, or whatever.

One word changed that: Kubernetes.

We’ll kick off Beck’s journey next time.