Netlify, as a company, has always been at least 50% distributed. Even if you lived around the office you were able to work from hom for half of the week to make sure we were all comfortable being remote. Now, like so many of us, the team is 100% remote, and maybe you are too! Whether you’ve been remote for years or this is new to you, being on a distributed team can be taxing to morale and teamwork.
The Developer Experience Engineering team has been leaning into not only pair coding sessions but also mob pairing with as many team members that can join. We’ve found that we’re able to talk through our coding problems much easier, collaborate asynchronously better afterwards, and even have fun!
If you’re curious just what mob pairing looks like, this sums it up quite well.
We’re not here to have fun.
(But we might as well celebrate merging PRs when we get together to write code)✨🕺💃✨
DJ: @jlengstorf
Choreography: @cassidoo
Bass: @Tzmanics & @philhawksworth pic.twitter.com/JUGXkiIJ4n— Phil Hawksworth (@philhawksworth) August 19, 2020
Don’t be fooled by the end of the video, we do remember to commit code often.
On this episode of Remotely Interesting, we talk through the aspects that we’ve found most beneficial as well as ways we’ve seen this strategy not work. We cover what we’ve experienced in the past with pair coding and how we compare the new approaches we take to it. These times have been trying on all of us and, at least for us weirdos on this team, this approach has given us a nice reprieve while being able to learn a lot from each other.
Pandemic Pair and Mob Programming
Hope you enjoy and, as always, we hope you find this podcast, Remotely Interesting.
