Team productivity

• He currently has 22 years of experience working with virtual machines
• In the beginning of 90's he worked on Strongtalk - a VM for Smalltalk. Wall-Street used Smalltalk in the 90's and his startup saw a big market in improving performance for Small Talk
• Sun announced Java and they were forced to change their plans, so they started on a Java VM. Some time after it was complete and it was about 2 times faster than Sun's Classical VM
• Sun bought Lars Bak's startup (they were only 5 people) and Lars Bak became the technology lead for Java Hotspot (the current VM that's used in Java). HotSpot improved Java's performance 20 times
• Lars Bak is now the tech lead for V8, Google Chrome's JavaScript virtual machine. Google's V8 team is pretty small, currently about 10 people, in the beginning thought they were even smaller

So Lars has been really successful and he has created impressive projects with very small teams (the V8 code base is about 100.000 lines of code). In the end of the lecture he shared some wisdom on team productivity:

• They had a working version of V8 in 4 months of development, the rest of the time was spent integrating it and making it compatible with other browser's JavaScript
• He thinks it's important to get something up and running - he does not value UML diagrams or specifications. And he thinks V8 would had failed if they started with the mundane tasks
• They did not use Scrum or Agile development - and he does not think it's necessary if you work with smart and motivated people

Personally, I really think small teams can make a big difference and I think the reason Lars Bak has succeeded with small teams is that all of the team members are/were smart and motivated.