With a bar in the office
you build better software

People who visit our office for the first time often look straight at the middle of the room. That is where a large bar stands. And it is not there by accident.

About ten years ago, when Roland and I started 10KB, it was just the two of us. Our first office was an eighty-square-metre hall that, even with the largest desk we could find, still looked alarmingly empty. Fresh out of school, we decided there would be a bar, because being your own boss somehow invites that kind of whim. What began as a student joke quickly turned into something more serious. As the company grew, I saw more and more clearly that the best ideas were born around that bar.

Software development, you will notice, is not a pure science. Many people think it is a lot like mathematics, with fixed rules and formal logic. Nothing could be further from the truth: programming is better compared to designing a house or writing a novel. A hundred completely different outcomes are imaginable, and the best spark often strikes when you least expect it.

That makes the social side of building software just as decisive as the technology. Talking with colleagues, asking questions, pausing together in thought: that is how solutions come to life that you would find much more slowly on your own.

How simple do you want the example? You are stuck, you hit a wall, and you simply tap a colleague on the shoulder with a suggestion: let's grab a coffee at the bar. That short walk downstairs often relaxes you enough already to loosen up stuck thinking. There you stand with a cup, you unpack your issue, and before you know it others ask critical questions so you start looking at the situation differently. Before long, after barely fifteen minutes, you have surfaced a considerably better solution.

In short: put a bar on the floor and simply write better software afterwards. It creates a place where informal contact and creativity meet, and that produces solutions that actually work for the problems we face.