The virtuous circle

The virtuous circle is the most powerful pattern in developer tooling. And it's the myth of the 10x developer that makes it hard to see. I've been thinking about this a lot recently, because of npmx . The 10x developer In a 1968 study , researchers found a gap between the most productive developers and the average developer. The 'best' developers were producing 10 times more output than the average. Something about this number stuck. Many of us believe that there are 10x developers out there. We either want to be a 10x developer or we feel inadequate because we feel we aren't. Or maybe we simply enjoy imagining our heroes as 10x developers. After all, there are rock stars out there – both in open source and within our companies. But I think it's unhelpful. And I think it misses the point. Building together There are a couple of interesting studies out there that suggest that iteration beats one-off design (at least, under time constraint), or that working in parallel produces better re