When assembling a team, our focus is on technology and procedure, not the workers themselves. As coders ourselves, we are more comfortable with rational, logical systems that we can easily manipulate. We shy away from dealing with the fundamental truth of a team: A development team is about the workers and how they relate to each other, not the work that they do.

In this series, we build up narratives that dance around the idea of what it means to belong to a team. We attempt to understand how a team is formed in the first place and how it keeps itself together as an entity bigger that the individual workers.

It’s hard to describe the nature of a team. The most palpable moment of understanding that bond is when a team is disbanded. It should be a moment of mourning. There should the immediate loss of the bond between friends and coworkers, but we should also feel the loss of a deeper, ineffable bond.