Today I've had the honor to listen to Woody Zuill for the second time.

The core idea behind Mob Programming is collaboration. It's what takes software development from a solo endeavour, to a team effort. By collaborating we get things done quicker, we are more likely to do the right thing, and have more fun doing it.

All the brilliant people working on the same thing, at the same time, in the same place, and on the same computer. -- Woody Zuill

At this presentation I got better insights into how to handle when there are multiple ideas (Make a note on a post-it, bring it up once you're done with the current way). How to argue for the practice (ask the counter question, how can it possibly be productive to separate people who should be working together?) and a renewed confidence that this way of working is in fact, the future. The short time I practiced it at an assignment I absolutely loved it.

It also resonates with a recurring thought I've been having a while now. Flow optimising vs. Resource optimizing organisations. A traditional organisation focuses on keeping everyone busy. The more people you've got doing things, the better, right? Wrong. This busy-ness has a hidden cost. The only way to keep more people busy, is by making everything take longer to do. Let me try to explain with an example. Say you've got 10 engineers doing 100 units of a work for a given period of time. (Humor me by imagining this is actually possible to measure). If you increase your development power to 100 engineers, you'll probably only get 10 to 50 units of work done in the same period of time. This is Brooks' Law. But it applies to organisations as well. It's over-engineering, it's management, it's big/slow internal systems, it's management, it's office politics, it's requiring large code bases to allow multiple people to work in it at the same time. While a Flow optimising organisation focuses on getting the right stuff done as efficiently as possible. Investing in research, force multipliers and autonomy instead of horse power.

I hope to do what I can to create an environment where brilliance, creativity and fun is inevitable.