One Room, Working Together

For the past few weeks a number of programmers and myself have been tasked to build an initial prototype for a system rewrite project, handed to us by management. The merit of such project is a matter of discussion for another day; for now it is enough to say that the team has been given a difficult challenge, but at the same time excited about the lessons we knew we will gain from such an adventure.

There’s been several takeaways already in terms of technology know-how – dockerized applications, front-end development with Vue, repositories as application vendor dependency, microservices – just several of the things we’ve never done before.

But the great takeaway so far is the joy of literally working together, inside a room away from distractions, the team working on one task at a time, focused, taking turns writing application or test code on a single machine, continuously discussing options and experimenting until a problem is solved or until it is time to take a break. We instantly become aligned at what we want to achieve, we immediately help teammates move forward, we learn from each other’s skills and mistakes, we have fun. It’s a wonder why we’ve never done much of this before. Perhaps it’s because of working in cubicles. Perhaps it’s because there’s nearly not enough available rooms for such software development practice. Perhaps it’s because we’ve never heard anything about mob programming until recently.

I’m sure it won’t be everyday since we have remote work schedules, but I imagine the team spending more days working together like this from here on.