A couple of weeks ago I embarked on my third trip to Denver to see our Arrow team over there. It’s always a very full but productive time visiting the guys there and this trip especially so.

As both Martin and I would be there at the same time we took the opportunity to organise a few team-wide sessions across the week.

We set-up 3 presentations and 4 open Q&A sessions. This was a great opportunity for the developers to highlight or get answers to areas they weren’t sure about and for Martin and I to have some insight into where the pain points might be working on the Arrow platform.

The team in Denver is continuing to grow rapidly and it was nice to finally meet face-to-face with some of the new people who have started since May. We’ve got a wide range of technical abilities across the team and so along with the presentations and Q&A sessions I was able to spend some quality pair-programming time. We looked more deeply into the reasons we structure our codebase and we discussed various options for how to build the features in their current sprint.

In the last couple of months 2 new teams have been created to build sections of the website. So as the platform is growing we looked at how the codebase will scale alongside the scaling of development teams.

It’s great seeing the developers frontend skills continue to improve, I’m thinking a lot about how we encourage those new skills to be transferred between people. Giving confidence to the once junior developers to share and support new people as they join the team and get to understand the codebase.

It’s nice to be back home in the beautiful Bath (UK) now but I’m glad to have these times. It is showing me that despite all the technological improvements that bring co-located teams closer together, it’s still not a substitute for meeting face-to-face.