pair-programming
(3)
Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock
Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock is the co-founder and CEO of the Recurse Center (originally Hacker School), a free, self-directed educational retreat in New York City where programmers spend up to three months getting dramatically better at their craft. A lifelong unschooler who taught himself to code on an Apple IIe, he built RC with no teachers, no curriculum, no grades, and no certificates, funding it through an optional recruiting service rather than tuition. Since 2011, thousands of programmers from teenagers to sixty-year-olds have passed through its doors, guided by ideas like 'building your volitional muscles' and a handful of deceptively simple social rules.
Corey Haines
Corey Haines is a software developer, community catalyst, and author who quit a dead-end job in 2008 with $2,400 in his pocket, hit the road for 9 months pairing with programmers across the US for room and board, and accidentally invented the Coderetreat movement along the way. He co-created Coderetreat (now run in 100+ countries annually), wrote 'Understanding the Four Rules of Simple Design' based on observing thousands of programming pairs, co-founded Hearken (an audience-engagement platform serving 60+ global newsrooms), and has spent two decades championing software fundamentals over hype — all while claiming his only real goal in life is to be happy.
Kent Beck
Kent Beck is the creator of Extreme Programming (XP) and a pioneer of Test-Driven Development, pair programming, and the Agile Manifesto. A programmer with 52+ years of experience, he co-created JUnit with Erich Gamma, co-invented CRC cards and design patterns in software with Ward Cunningham, and spent seven years coaching at Facebook. Today he runs the 'Software Design: Tidy First?' Substack newsletter (123,500+ subscribers in 195 countries), hosts the Still Burning podcast, and explores augmented human-AI coding. In April 2026 he publicly announced a Parkinson's disease diagnosis, continuing his mission to help technologists feel safe in the world.