Posts

It’s really easy to be bogged down with all the crap in life. There is a good amount of it and I don’t know anyone that doesn’t struggle with keeping a good attitude at some time or another. I’ve struggled at various points to stay positive both in my personal life and publicly. I don’t think it’s wrong to have negative thoughts or to even voice struggles or frustrations, but there is a danger in openly venting. It creates a culture that is great at complaining and bad at doing anything about it. It creates an entire set of people bogged down in the crap of their lives, and because of the loud voices they hear all around them, it seems like there is no escape from it. There is so little good that comes from complaining publicly. ...

I had my first international pairing session with @javichitone tonight. He’s from Peru and will soon be graduating. He should have no trouble finding a job based on the code I got to read of his :) We talked for a bit and settled into looking at a gem he recently published. Since it was his gem, I elected to drive. I’m familiar enough with gems that I’m comfortable in general, but he knew the specifics of his gem, so to get the most out of it, he needed to be commenting on the specifics he knew and I needed to be diving into figuring out those specifics. ...

Another great pairing session tonight with @jdar! I continue to be amazed at how pleasant and personable the developers I meet are. The internet is a wonderful place. First up, I’d never coded a Chrome Extension, so Darius took the reigns and started walking through what we were using. The biggest takeaway I got was to put your pride away when you’re pairing. Everyone’s exploring, we’re all trying to get to the next answer, so it doesn’t matter if we’re really well prepared or never coded before… just take the next step. ...

Last night I did a #pairwithme session with Karl Meisterheim. He’s an experienced developer who currently work part time and was looking to improve his skills. Besides having a good deal in common and really enjoying our conversation, I also learned a bit more about remote pairing and came away with a couple of observations. First off, we paired 2 nights in a row for about an hour each night. Both sessions we tried to solve the same problem: TicTacToe. We started off on the second night with the code from the first night, but quickly threw it away and decided to “start over” as an excercise. Doing this taught me the most significant lessons from our session. ...

When I heard about the #pairwithme idea, I thought it was something I really wanted to do. I set aside 3 nights a week from 9-10pm and started pinging people on Twitter during that time, asking if they wanted to pair. I tried for no less than 3 weeks before actually getting a real pairing session going. I had several cancellations and a bunch of fits and starts trying to figure out how to really communicate with people. Here’s my takeaways from the experience of coordinating sessions remotely. ...

I had a great pairing session with @thecommongeek tonight. It was my first live-remote pair programming and I wanted to to a little “post mortem” on it to record my thoughts. We spent some time on introductions and then jumped into a problem. Since my box was all set up, I typed. I’m more experienced than Dennis as a coder, so I viewed it as the potential to mentor him a bit. I also learned from him both in the “how to be a better mentor” department and the “how to pair better” department. ...

I often have a bit of time that I could spend on other tasks, but couldn’t set up a true share-and-pair session due to logistics and communication issues. A friend of mine suggested that we “pair” over github. I took the idea to the next level by creating a true ping-pong pairing project where each commit is a ping or a pong. Here’s the basic setup: Create a README with the full description of the “task” at hand Create a github repo and add your ‘pair’ as a collaborator. Write a failing spec git commit and git push Then, each individual takes turns doing the following: ...

As coders, we’re often given tasks to do. These tasks can sometimes overwhelm even the best of us. How many times have you stared at a problem and when you finally sat down to attack it, you spent a quarter of the time you expected to on it. If only you hadn’t spent 3 hours playing Angry Birds. There are lots of things you can do to “hack” your productivity, but most of them are focused on helping you keep track of tasks instead of motivating you to get going. ...

I love GTD. I love making lists and having things to do. I love having a system. That also makes me love bug trackers when I’m on a team. I love having everything listed in one place. I love letting it be the communication point for a team to get things done. Bug Trackers and To Do lists are great. They just don’t seem to work very well together most of the time. ...

I always find it interesting to place artificial constraints on myself. I don’t think it’s the constraint itself that is good as much as what it shows me about myself or what I do. I read an article on Rands in Repose a few years ago that talked about giving up your mouse for Photoshop. The idea isn’t to rid yourself of the mouse entirely. The idea is to make you aware of when you depend on the mouse. ...