Chapter 9. Affinity: From Individuals to Teams

From job descriptions to performance reviews, many people focus on success only within a single team. Between teams, organizational units, and even companies, however, there exist relationships that impact the speed and value of work. Mark Granovetter, an American sociologist, described the importance of these relationships, the combination of strong and weak links between individuals and the way that information flows over these various links in his 1973 paper, “The Strength of Weak Ties.”1

Sparkle Corp Development Demo Day

With Josie’s past experience with MongoDB, she was able to help Alice and Geordie quickly bring up a couple of virtual machines they will use for comparing and demoing both MongoDB and MySQL. They created a demo of a simple web-based photo application with a star rating feature.

Hedwig, the project manager, and George, the operations engineer, joined the development team’s weekly demo meeting to see the progress the team was making as well as to examine the differences between the two products as they manifest in a more real-world scenario.

“I really liked how quickly it was to develop the application with MongoDB. A lot of the features that we’ve talked about with the review platform already exist in this JavaScript framework, which works seamlessly with MongoDB. That would give us the development time that we want to spend on working on preventing harassment and detecting bullying behavior in the ...

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