Sunday, October 18, 2015

Writing a blog or writing a book

If you read my blog, you must have figured out by now that I like writing. Writing is my way of externalizing my thoughts, making notes of them and finding bugs in my thinking patterns. I forget my thoughts and going back to them helps me see things with fresh eyes. Now I'm moving from writing a blog to writing books, discovering LeanPub.

A theme I have been writing about a lot is pair programming (strong-style) and in particular mob programming that includes the same pairing mechanism as strong-style but extends to the whole team.

In Tampere Goes Agile 2014, I invited Woody Zuill to share my community his story on Mob Programming. Since then, I've been practicing to get towards it and learned that Mob Programming is a gateway to pair programming too for pairing reluctant developers. It feels safer as the first step, and shares the responsibilities of growing up those who are behind in their skills development on some area. In Tampere Goes Agile 2015 just this weekend, someone phrased it nicely: a year ago they heard about Mob Programming for the first time. Now it feels like it's everywhere.

There's companies like Mystes in Helsinki who have several teams mob programming full time and sharing their experiences locally, like in Scan Agile 2015 -conference. There's people like Woody Zuill and Llewellyn Falco, who have both been around since inception of the concept that keep showing up. Llewellyn now lives in Finland, and Woody has been back twice since first visit in Tampere Goes Agile 2014. I've experienced a bunch of coding sessions in mob format to learn refactoring and test-driven development. And I've started experimenting with mobbing at my work, and in particular, I've transformed all my exploratory testing training sessions into a mob format during the last year. It just works in learning so well.

From a discussion with Juho Vepsäläinen I realized that the work I do in background (writing a book) I should change into doing it in the foreground, as other people energize me. So yesterday I published with Llewellyn Falco our first version of one of our books in progress.


Today, we have sold for money 3 books. The support of people in writing can make a world of a difference. It makes a difference for us. Writing when you know there's someone who wants what you're writing creates a different feeling. I can only call it "driven". This book goes forward, and it will be awesome.

I feel I need to add thanks to all those people, who tell us stories of struggles on introducing mob programming. How it feels wrong and how it fails. That comparison is already helping us isolate some of the patterns that you might want to recognize that helps you in succeeding and getting well started.

It's time for me to learn how is it different to write a blog and write a book - in leanpub style. This should be fun!