Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pair Programming Antipatterns

tuple.app

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 136 posts

Re: Pair Programming Antipatterns

#3

Post by Aeolun »

number6 wrote: post #2

Using two input devices on one PC never occurred to me. Is it just plug and play or does it require some setup ?

Based on my connecting multiple boards, I think it’s plug and play. The hard part is if you want to distinguish between what board a keystroke came from.

Re: Pair Programming Antipatterns

#4

Post by scanr »

We tried out Live Share (collaborative editing) during pair and mob programming sessions. I enjoyed it a lot - made it feel like a multi-player game.

Sometimes it did allow for the equivalent of a pair programmer taking over the keyboard rather than explaining how to solve a problem.

I’m curious if anyone has any Live Share patterns / anti-patterns.

Re: Pair Programming Antipatterns

#7

Post by gregkerzhner »

Pairing is great for some tasks, like higher level design and whiteboarding sessions. But when it comes to implementation (coding) time I really dislike it.

I think ultimately, at the end of the day, I expect and hope that every human I work with is a competent, solid individual contributor and does not require a co-driver to produce meaningful work.

I definitely see the value in pairing for imbalanced situations (junior and senior, new engineer and tenured), but such sessions should have the goal of getting each person to operate independently, hopefully sooner than later.

Pairing just for the sake of pairing is an encroachment on many things I love about software (the ability to think about a problem deeply and quietly, the ability to work independently, the ability to check my Twitter feed as often as I damn please). I’m really glad the pairing fad seems to be dying down in general!

Re: Pair Programming Antipatterns

#8

Post by skeletal88 »

I work at a place where we do exclusively pair programming (a software consultancy). A project always has at least one pair.

Each workstation has a computer, 2 monitors, 2 mice and keyboards. When someone can't be at the office then we sometimes use Tuple, and it's a great tool, unfortunately still only works on Macs.

Pairing works for us because it's more efficient than working alone, less bugs and better thought out design, faster spread of knowledge about our tools and the project in general. I joined a year ago and hadn't used Java or IDEA, pairing helped me learn all of it very fast, compared to if I had to work alone and struggle with learning all of the new things.

Re: Pair Programming Antipatterns

#10

Post by jordanbeiber »

gregkerzhner wrote: post #7

Pairing is great for some tasks, like higher level design and whiteboarding sessions. But when it comes to implementation (coding) time I really dislike it. I think ultimately, at the end of the day, I expect and hope that every human I work with is a competent, solid individual contributor and does not require a co-driver to produce meaningful work. I definitely see the value in pairing for imbalanced situations (ju…

In, for example, an enterprise setting you rarely want individually clever and creative solutions.

You generally want domain expertise shared in a team, and continuously molded to perfection over time.

Mobs and pairs can really shine here, but it all depends on the individuals.

In teams where it works well it’s an enormous value add, in my experience, and the hive mind you reach after a year or two within a team is fantastic.

As a dev manager I let the teams decide, but looking at team flow over time, it looks hard to beat a well functioning pair or mob team. IMHO & YMMV, and so on.

Post reply on HN