A day of Pairing

8th Light Apprenticeship - Day 77

Over the last few weeks, Mateu and Danny have been working together on a client project. As they pair, they talk about the changes they are making. In the morning I actually paired with Mateu on the same project, and he carefully explained some background on the application, showed me the spike code he has put together, and we set about TDD-ing the changes back in.

What was really interesting is that I could see in the code, all the terminology that Mateu and Danny have been chatting about. The domain really seemed to match the conversations they have been having which perhaps points to a ubiquitous language.

In the afternoon we had a lot of visitors, and three of us gave a pairing talk, which we performed at a code bootcamp earlier in the week. We demonstrated ‘bad’ pairing, gave some tips on what is good and what is not so good, then asked two people to try out ‘good’ pairing. People were game and it was very entertaining to watch! After, I paired with one of my friends who had visited. I was doing some small refactoring on my web tic tac toe, and he was able to help with the styling of the grid on the web page, plus I picked up a couple of new vim shortcuts. Always a bonus!

At the end of the day I took my co-mentor through all the changes that I have been making, as he has been busy at a client and working off site. I got some tips on how to clean up the entry point to the web application. I learnt a lot, and I have some new ideas to apply to my game over the weekend, to take the code to the next level. He said we could pair next Friday on a little challenge, non tic tac toe related. Sounds good, so I’m looking forward to that!