Pair Programming

Pair programming is something I miss too much. I moved from pairing with people for entire days to working alone.

It was not always like that. I always was a perfect firefighter, shipping everything to production asap. But then, I hopped on a chill project, and this is where we pair programmed for hours. It was hard at first. We started random banter in between and were not productive etc. But once you break through that initial resistance, there is no going back.

The advantages of pair programming are many, some of them that I have noticed are

Low errors

The fact that two people come together and do one thing has a lot of benefits, and the biggest one is you find flaws quicker.

Ever happened you put every ounce of thought into a tech doc of a feature and perfectly put it together in the code. And the moment your senior dev on the team gets eyes on the code, "I see some problems, big problems!" are the initial words out of their mouth. And here we are scratching our heads over why didn't we think about it.

That is perfectly normal. People miss out on details very often. But eventually, someone notices it. Having two sets of eyes is always better than one. If no one is reviewing your work, you have a lot of room for errors. But when the review is happening as and when you write code it is faster, and you are less prone to making errors this way.

Pushing you into that flow

I don't know about others, but not everyone can be in a state of flow for hours and hours in a day. But when you pair up, it is easier. Finding it hard to complete that suite of unit test cases, pair up with someone and see the difference. The more comfortable you are with your partner the easier it is.

Fewer reviews

One of the best things while pair programming is the bulk reviews are gone. Your code is under review as and when you write it. Also, this review is not just a glance. Both parties are actively contributing to achieving something. If you are good at this, you can skip code reviews altogether.

Learning

It can teach you both a lot of things. And if you carefully pair the right people together, it can do wonders. A good mentor can speed up your learning quite rapidly. Not to say juniors do not bring anything valuable to the table. Many of them are really excited to work on things and would deliver extremely quickly. Yes not perfect, but still fast :)

Enjoying the work

I really believe that work should be fun and you should enjoy it. Some of the best friends I have in life now are from work. It all happened because we write code together, we fight over it together, and we bitch about how doing TDD ruins your life together :(

To summarize, you will love your work more while meeting new people and making new friends.

Conclusion

I love pair programming. I usually work alone now due to being the sole front-end developer on the team. But I often ask people from my org to come and pair up with me if they have free time. Also, a lot of things about pair programming have to be done right. Here is a good talk on The Road to Continuous Deployment by Swanand (Tech Dad at CoLearn), which dives deep into a sustainable culture of building and shipping great products.