GIE Mobbing Sessions

I've been in conversation with the G Idea Exchange. They are trying to promote open source collaboration. At one point we came up with the idea to have mob programming sessions where potential collaborators could get together and work as a mob on open source projects.

Initial Forays

I hosted a mobbing session a few weeks before GDevCon. It just so happened that Llewelyn Falco was in town and he agreed to help facilitate a session. We just did a simple kata. Everyone enjoyed it and we learned a lot.

AWS Appstream

One thing Llewelyn put us onto was using AWS Appstream instead of screen sharing through Zoom. It worked really well. You can just use the image builder to set everything up and then it lets you share a link that gives anyone who has the link access through a web browser. It's nice because there is no latency like there can be with Zoom. Switchover is nice and easy, you don't have to switch who is sharing their screen or request control. No one has to install anything on their computer since it is all pre-setup. All they need is a browser. Overall it is pretty good. It does have a cost associated with it. There is a storage cost, which is minimal, and a much more expensive usage charge when it is running. The cost is reasonable if you shut down the machine in between sessions. This lets you pick one of the largest instances so it is plenty responsive.

Mobbing on Blue

I did a mobbing session last week with the 2 Eric(h) Ss (Eric Stach and Erich Schlieper). We worked on my autoformatting tool Blue. Darren's presentation at GDevCon NA inspired a new feature so we went and added it. We didn't quite finish it in the mobbing session - we had some issues with getting the dependencies installed on the Appstream image. I also spent some time explaining the project structure to the Erics. in our 1 hour session, we did manage to add some stubs for the new feature and a failing test. After the mobbing session, I was pretty quickly able to implement the code (it was a very simple scripting code) and make a new release. So the process works. In the future with the dependencies installed on the Appstream image, we should be able to crank out a similar new feature in a single 1-hour mob programming session. That is really cool!

Why Join?

So you might be asking - why join one of these sessions? Aside from the fact that it is a lot of fun, there are some more practical reasons. You can learn how to mob program and work in a team. You get to watch everyone else code and learn all their favorite IDE shortcuts and tools. You get the satisfaction of contributing to the community (and maybe even your favorite open-source project) and get some credit through the VIPM.io collaborators feature. Maybe we can even talk NI into giving recertification credit for participating. No promises, but I mentioned the idea to Eric and he seemed to think it was a good idea.

Future Sessions

I'm not sure exactly what the plan is from the GIE and I know they are planning to host more of these sessions and make them public. In the meantime, if this sounds interesting to any of you, ping me and I'll keep a list. I might start organizing some of these on my own as well.