Alexander Beletsky's development blog

My profession is engineering

The Power of Close Collaboration

The collaboration and communication is very important in solving problems. As much better collaboration you have as much fast you are able to handle different issue. As closer people to each other, as better they able to work. That’s why I think that distributed teams even if they consists of great engineers could not work 100% of their potential. Lags in communications, language barrier, loose of body languages etc. makes it 80% for best cases.

As you might know I’m currently working on candidate.net project. I really want to release that and according to my original plans I was really close to do that. But, suddenly my application just stopped to work. I’ll skip details of bug, but it was a ship killer. Application was not able to clone/pull github repositories. The only thing that happened between periods of working and non-working states is that I upgraded my Windows 7 up to SP1.

Even if I had great support by @ukraitor who forked my project recently, we were not able to solve it (remember, distributed teams - he is from Odessa, far from me). I was pulling out my hair and mostly lost a hope to solve that. But I decided to share the problem on latest Beer && Code meeting we had this Tuesday.

It is usually hard to explain your problem. Along the process, I think to myself - “those people are pretty far from problem context, could they indeed help me?”. The simple answer is “Yes, they can”. Never underestimate the people around you.

During 2 hours we’ve been able to try different scenarios, discuss some potential issues and finally found a clue! I was so happy about that, at least my work moved from a dead point. I’m sure, I could not complete it by my own (in reasonable time).

So, my point is: if you are in work project - immediately share you problem with colleagues don’t make yourself completely stucked. If you work on your own project - it is better if you find a collaborator, if you don’t have one you might find a local group, like Beer && Code or talk to your developers friends whatever.

Remember, as closer the collaborator is as better. Special thank’s today goes to @chaliy who helped to solve the issue.