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saas_co_de

http://programming-motherfucker.com/

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Zed Shaw is a treasure. I'm not sure he's all that much of a role model.

https://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/advice.html

Well, he's good at heart and knows his stuff.

Like all of us, he's just human

I don't know anything about the guy but his analysis of agile consultants and agile development agencies is spot on.

Oh yes, this rings true with me.

I once worked at a company where the powers that be decided to go all Scrum. They hired a PM to convert all project, inc ongoing ones, to Scrum. It turned an enjoyable job in to a miserable one.

I suppose it's as good a programming religion as any other.

do people really pair program in real life? I've never actually seen it

I find it useful for knowledge transfer. It's a good way of bringing new hires up to speed for the first week / two weeks. If you leave them to their own devices they have a tendency to get overwhelmed and fearful of continually bothering you to ask questions.

It's sometimes a more efficient way of building stuff where, for a particular task, you need a whole bunch of knowledge or information that's currently living in somebody else's head.

Also, if I'm having one of those days when I feel sluggish having another person there kickstarts me a bit...

Defaulting to pair programming for every task - especially when the conditions above are not met is a super inefficient and overbearing way of developing though.

Yes. Pair programming as the default for me since 2004. I've done it full time for 8 years at an XP shop (Scrum was added later) w/ 3 teams of 20+ total on 3 different continents. Worked for an Agile consultancy and trained people on Pair Programming and TDD for 4 years. I'm now working for an org that does both Pairing AND mob programming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mob_programming). It takes time, patience, and humility to learn how to do well. I find teams that pair simply build better software that has less bugs. There's literally a book on it to consider (https://www.amazon.com/Pair-Programming-Illuminated-Laurie-W...).

Just to counter the other responses here. Yes, and it's even more dreadful than you might imagine if you've never done it. I recommend running fast and far away if you ever find yourself interviewing on a team where pairing is the default assumption.

I have done it and it works great if you respect the work and each other. It's a nightmare with people who don't care.

Yes, and I highly recommend it!

source: used to think pair programming was odd until I gave it a proper go.

Yes.

at which company did you see it, and was it everyone

just saying motherfucker a few times does not magically create a solid argument

I don't know. Samuel L. Jackson seems to do alright even when he doesn't have Tarantino writing for him.

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