How do you scale an agile team without sacrificing collaboration, flow, or developer experience?

In this episode of the Mob Mentality Show, we’re joined by Brice Ruth—engineering leader at Flexion and ensemble programming advocate—for a deep dive into what it takes to build high-functioning, adaptable software teams through a concept he calls “mob meiosis.”

We explore Brice’s journey from solo coding to full-time mob programming, and how his experience in the industry and in government contracts shaped his philosophy on team dynamics, learning cultures, and system design. If you’re looking for actionable insights into building fast feedback loops, enhancing developer onboarding, or evolving your mob into multiple autonomous mobs, this is the episode you don’t want to miss.

🔍 What you’ll learn:

What “mob meiosis” is and how it enables team scaling without silos

How to engineer feedback loops that operate across code, communication, and team structure

Why ensemble programming improves developer flow, learning, and job satisfaction

Lessons from transitioning into mobbing full-time—and how to make it sustainable

Tips for fostering a culture where pairing, mobbing, and continuous improvement thrive

Whether you’re an agile coach, engineering manager, or developer looking to elevate your team’s practices, Brice brings a sharp, experience-backed perspective on what it means to lead with feedback, prioritize team health, and scale with purpose.

🎙️ Subscribe to the Mob Mentality Show for more episodes on ensemble programming, agile culture, and modern software team dynamics.

In this eye-opening episode of the Mob Mentality Show, we sit down with software engineer and consultant William Bernting to explore a radical approach to hiring, teamwork, and technical leadership.

William walks us through his real-world experience with mob programming interviews—a collaborative hiring process where candidates join the team in an ensemble coding session, not a contrived solo coder test. He shares the surprising benefits of evaluating candidates through communication, alignment, and problem-solving over individual technical trivia.

We dive into:

Why mob programming is a great way to assess team fit and long-term success

How to structure collaborative interviews that reduce anxiety and reveal true strengths

What happens when you ditch traditional project-led methods and focus on predictability through steady flow

How the Cynefin framework helps make sense of complex team dynamics and guides leadership decisions

What freelance engineering looks like when trust, autonomy, and collaboration lead the way

William also discusses how he's made his work more stable and sustainable—for both clients and team members—without relying on estimates or rigid plans. Instead, he uses continuous delivery, test-driven development (TDD), and mobbing to achieve results that are both reliable and adaptable.

Whether you're a hiring manager rethinking your interview process, an engineer looking to join better teams, or a leader trying to move beyond chaotic delivery cycles, this conversation offers practical takeaways and fresh perspective.

In this episode of the Mob Mentality Show, we sit down with Taimoor Imtiaz—CTO at a fast-moving, bootstrapped startup—for a raw, insightful dive into how his small dev team applied mob programming, trunk-based development, and GitHub Flow to accelerate delivery without sacrificing code quality.

How GitHub Flow can be adapted for trunk-based development

Why mob programming improved debugging and reduced defects

Where mob timebox timers went wrong—and what the team did about it

The real impact of developer experience and culture on delivery speed

Lessons learned from using a monorepo in a fast-growing codebase

Using extreme programming when resources are tight

Whether you’re a startup CTO, team lead, or individual contributor looking to evolve your team’s workflow, this episode offers real-world insights into modern software development practices that actually work under pressure.

📚 How does Mob Programming really work in the college classroom? In this episode of the Mob Mentality Show, we reconnect with Professor Ben Kovitz to explore the raw lessons, surprising wins, and tough challenges from a full semester of mob programming in a college software design course.

Why mob programming created stronger learning and better teamwork than expected

How structured rotations got everyone participating and avoiding common pairing pitfalls

The highs and lows of using C++ and Qt in a classroom setting

The unexpected power of students struggling through real software challenges together

Lessons on undo implementation, design patterns, and memory management from hands-on mobbing

How a semester wasn’t enough time to fully teach long-term code stewardship and habitable design

What might scale—or fall apart—if mob programming were applied to larger classes

How this classroom experience mirrors the real world: legacy code, fast feedback, technical debt, and learning as you go

Whether you’re a software engineer, an educator, or someone passionate about team learning, this episode gives you actionable insights into mob programming as both a teaching tool and a real-world development practice.

Can mob programming work with 30+ students?

How can solo work and group collaboration coexist in the best learning environments?

What does it take to create code that’s not just correct—but actually pleasant to maintain?

If you’re interested in agile learning, collaborative coding, and pushing the boundaries of how we teach and work as software teams, this episode is for you.

🎲 In this episode of the Mob Mentality Show, we dive into a unique and game-changing (literally) approach to learning Test-Driven Development (TDD) with Ted M. Young (JitterTed), John Wilson, and Janis Kampe.

Discover the origin story of the TDD board game that started as a simple teaching aid and evolved into a powerful learning experience for developers, teams, and even product managers. Hear how this game went from casual pub nights to becoming a staple for some in team training sessions, meetups, and Agile coaching toolkits.

We break down:

✅ How the TDD board game helps teams internalize the deeper steps of TDD beyond the basic "Red-Green-Refactor" mantra.

✅ Why the game’s focus on prediction, risk management, and working in small steps transforms the way people think about writing code.

✅ The surprising ways the game builds psychological safety, making it accessible even to people new to TDD or nervous about exposing gaps in their knowledge.

✅ How the game naturally leads to ensemble (mob) programming and seamless transitions into hands-on coding platforms like CyberDojo.

✅ Practical tips on using the game to onboard, coach, and improve team collaboration—whether you're remote, hybrid, or in-person.

We also explore the importance of failing safely, incremental learning, and how the game allows players to experience both the thrill of success and the consequences of cutting corners—without the high stakes of real-world code.

Whether you're a developer, Agile coach, product manager, or just curious about TDD, this episode will give you actionable insights on:

🛠 How to enable continuous learning in your teams.

🎯 Why predicting outcomes matters more than just getting green tests.

🎮 How gamification makes TDD fun, social, and sticky.

Key Topics:

TDD Board Game Mechanics & Variations

Psychological Safety in Learning

Risk vs. Reward in Software Development

Ensemble Programming (Mob Programming)

Transitioning from Game to CyberDojo

Practical Coaching Tools for TDD and XP

Building Stronger Developer-Product Manager Collaboration

Video and Show Notes: https://youtu.be/GjcUdoS5K6I  

👨‍💻 Legacy code isn’t just old untested code—it’s a symptom of deeper problems in your organization. In this no-fluff episode of the Mob Mentality Show, we’re joined by Agile and technical coach Wouter Lagerweij to break down why legacy issues persist and how shared responsibility between product and engineering is the key to meaningful change.

🎙️ What happens when software engineers and leaders don’t speak the same language? How do context-free Agile practices and technical dogma lead teams astray? And how do we create engineering cultures that deliver real business value without burning out?

In this Mob Mentality Show episode, we sit down with Kyle Rowland—leadership and software consultant, 20-year software engineering veteran, and author of Powerful Profitable Software Products: The Executive Guidebook—to tackle the tough questions at the heart of sustainable, impactful software delivery.

💡 What We Cover in This Episode:

🔧 The Engineering-Leadership Impedance Mismatch

⚠️ The Danger of Context-Free Agile

🔬 Empiricism vs. Philosophy in Tech Decisions

⏱️ The 1:40 Rule and Escaping Tactical Overload

📚 Plus: Behind the Book

🎧 Whether you're an engineering leader, product owner, or software dev, this episode is packed with insights on leadership, systems thinking, quality, speed, and how to build software that matters.

What if your beliefs—about work, people, or even yourself—are quietly holding you back? In this episode of The Mob Mentality Show, we sit down with visual thinker, author, and accidental Mob Programming anthropologist Dave Gray to unpack the power of belief, clarity, and collaboration in tech and beyond.

Dave Gray is known for Liminal Thinking—a book about understanding the invisible beliefs that shape behavior and systems. But did he know he was writing a book about us? Turns out, our Mob Programming origin story and Dave’s journey are more connected than you’d expect.

With roots as an artist, Dave brings a rare perspective to complex tech and business systems. From prior infographic posters that demystified RFID and Bluetooth when they first came out, to visual guides on inner transformation and his latest books, Dave's work simplifies the complicated and builds bridges for real understanding.

With Dave we explore:

What led Dave from agile software development to Liminal Thinking

Why most Agile transformations fail 

How to navigate confusing resistance—are people really lost, or just saying “no”?

The principles behind creating safe spaces and disrupting unhelpful routines

Visual and liminal thinking for fostering organic authentic change, not just communication tricks

Raw observation vs. narrative: how perception can distort reality

Why having lunch with someone you think is "crazy" or "stupid" might be the wisest move

The psychology behind tech resistance, organizational inertia, and true agility

We also revisit how Woody Zuill and our original Mob Programming team with Chris Lucian smashed the belief that “real work” only happens in cubicles and outside of "meetings." The mob origin story had Liminal Thinking on full display as that team reflected, questioned, and ultimately acted in defiance of broken norms. The result? A shift in how we define space, collaboration, and innovation as Dave captures in his book. 

If you work in tech, lead change, facilitate teams, or just feel stuck inside outdated ways of working, this episode is for you.

In this thought-provoking episode, we sit down with Tobias Mayer—author, coach, and longtime voice in the Agile world—to explore the journey from his early discovery of XP (Extreme Programming) in 1997 all the way to today’s debate around the death of Scrum.

Tobias shares his personal transformation from developer to Scrum Master, his resistance to early XP, and how he learned great practices from developers he managed. We unpack his reflections on Agile’s semantic drift, the role of Scrum Masters as change agents vs. bean counters, and what happens when teams do Agile without even knowing the Agile Manifesto.

🔍 Topics we dive deep into:

We also dig into mob programming (aka mobbing)—what it means, why the name matters, and whether or not new metaphors like “ensemble programming” or “teaming” (à la Amy Edmondson) better reflect how high-performing teams really work.

💡 Plus:

Tobias brings rich context from classics, theology, and history—yes, even turning a conference t-shirt into fashion—to challenge how we think about building products, teams, and businesses.

🛠️ Whether you're into XP, Scrum, Mob Programming, Lean, or simply want to rethink your metaphors and language at work, this episode delivers grounded insight, sharp critique, and fresh perspectives.

👉 Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of agile thinking, real teamwork, and modern product development.

🎙️ In this episode of The Mob Mentality Show, we’re joined by Professor Ben Kovitz—a former software developer with 15 years of industry experience who went on to earn a PhD and is now teaching Computer Science at Cal Poly Humboldt. Prof Ben flips the script and brings his own real-world mob programming questions—challenges he’s faced while mobbing live with college students in the classroom.

This is not theory. These are hard-won questions from the trenches of mob programming in a learning environment, where curiosity meets complexity, and group dynamics get real.

🔍 We dive deep into 5 key challenges:

1. Deep Thought vs. Mob Timers:

2. Upfront Design or Just Start Mobbing?

3. The Overrun Navigator:

4. The Strong Opinion Navigator:

5. Mobbing with Documentation and AI:

💡 This episode is full of insights on:

Group facilitation in real-time coding

Balancing solo and group learning

Creating psychological safety in a mob

Adapting mob rules to context—not dogma

Bringing agile, XP (Extreme Programming), and education together in the mobbing practice

Video and Show Notes: https://youtu.be/nAAI5f7-vTs