Over the past four months Milen, Maxim and I have been building the coMra.life platform.
At the beginning Milen had a requirement to build a database to manage coMra Case Studies and Testimonials.
Maxim had a requirement to build a community platform for sharing experiences through blog posts and social interaction.
I had the technical expertise to help navigate us through he process of building the platform.
The first step was setting up a space where we could get together regularly. Maxim also suggested that we actually use our sessions to take a practical step.
At the beginning of each session we always start with greeting each other.
We then begin a process of writing down what each of us want to do in the session and grooming items that have come up during the week and the previous session.
We then prioritize these and come to an agreement of what we want to tackle next. This is in the form of a simple list.
Once we had agreed on what to tackle we choose the first one and dive in.
Items can take the form of support for one of us on our local development environment, testing a new feature in the underlying framework we chose to build the platform on, implementing a feature or hunting a bug.
The initial agreement helps to keep us focused on one thing at a time. The list helps as a anchor to come back to and shift the focus back to the big picture.
Working together helps with attention. In pairing where two or more people work together our attention is combined which helps increase awareness significantly.
This works even if one person is not technical but their full attention is there. It also accelerates learning and sharing between everyone.
The sharing of the process of trial and error and then eventual success fosters a sense of comradery.
Early challenges are often in the nature of exposing what we don't know to each other. This can be very scary initially until trust over a number of sessions is built up.
The mood in our team quickly evolved past a mood of fear of exposure and grim determination to one of encouragement, fun and learning together.