Over the past 12 months we shared 5398 pictures in our internal chat at feenk. This means more than 20 per work day. Or about 2-3 per developer per day.

These pictures are typically screenshots of Glamorous Toolkit showing different views of the systems we work on. It is important to note that we work entirely remotely, with no scheduled meetings and no central planning, and that the chat is our primary communication tool. We use these pictures as an engineering means to solve problems faster.

This is the effect of Moldable Development, which is a way of programming through which we construct custom tools for every development problem. We looked for quite some time for a way to quantify the impact of Moldable Development in practice. The amount of shared pictures is the most interesting metric we could find so far.

Why?

Because these pictures compress communication. The compression is so dramatic and so empowering that it's hard to imagine communicating any other way.

If we look back in history, every time communication costs dropped, dramatic jumps were made possible. I started asking people how often they demo something about a system. People typically demo every few weeks. Just a couple of decades ago this number would have appeared unrealistic, and for most it would have also appeared unnecessary. But once people started to learn faster about the system, it changed their work rather deeply.

Now, we demo dozens of times per day. This is about 2 orders of magnitude more than the current state of practice. And I am quite certain another order of magnitude would still be reachable.

What would you think this feedback speed brings with it?