This week I was having a conversation with some fellow developers at the ALT.NET Open Spaces conference and an interesting topic came up. We were talking about vast amounts of time, mostly personal time, we spend trying to improve our skills and our craft. We spend time reading and writing blogs, books, mailing list messages, attending and giving talks, contributing to Open Source, and reading and writing code.

We spend a huge number of hours in the quest for continuous improvement.

Self-teaching is good

We all agreed that self-teaching is important and we do it because we enjoy it, but man does it take a lot of time. For many of us that means we sacrifice or compromise when it comes to time spent with families, friends, and other parts of our lives.

Why? Because we're thirsty for knowledge and we know that others are out there doing things differently, and possibly better. We hope that by learning from them we can improve ourselves and our craft in the larger sense.

After some war stories and one-uppers we realized something. It be great if we could spend more time working with, and learning from, each other... in person! Ideally resulting in less wasted time banging our heads into the keyboard and more time doing other life stuff.

Learning from each other is better

What if we could each spend a few days a quarter at another developer's job, pairing with and observing he and his team work. Just being able to experience someone else's take on Scrum/XP, BDD, etc... would be awesome. The potential for cross-pollination and exchange of ideas and practices is almost limitless.

And think about how much faster we could learn in person. With such an immediate and personal feedback loop we might just find ourselves with enough free time to try to regain some of those things we're giving up now.

I have no doubt that going to observe Scott Bellware's team in action for a few days - or even better, an entire iteration - would have resulted in me learning more about BDD and challenging more of my own, and hopefully some of their, thoughts and understandings than I got six months of going it alone. And that translates to fewer nights with in front of my computer until 3am, and more time for the rest of my life.

And what about you? Wouldn't you love to go hang with Jeremy Miller and see how he runs his teams and with any luck, have some of his ReSharper-fu rub off on you?

Or see just why Aaron Jensen and Jacob Lewallen (a.k.a.: the Eleutian guys) love that AutoMocking Container so much? And believe me, they are stupid-smart guys!

How much better a developer would you be if you could regularly observe another Agile team in action... in person.