Pair programming is highly promoted at Makers Academy and its making its way as a best practice across organisations.

So what is pair programming?

Pair programming is when two people sit together (or join remotely) and work on a code. An essential part of pair programming is the driver/navigator relationship.

You can easily associate the driver/navigator part to driving a car in an unknown area with a friend. Your friend will be taking into consideration the broader picture and whether you are going in the right direction, looking at the GPS or ae hard copy of a map (seriously, hard copy?). On the other hand, you as a driver will be focused on the road and not to hit a pedestrian or a tree maybe.

Let’s look at The driver/navigator relationship in programming now. The navigator will think more broadly about what our code needs to achieve and look at the documentation (i.e.GPS) related to the task at hand. The driver on the other hand will be kepply focused on the code and the present objective which needs to be achieved.

Pair programming is really good when you are new to a specific language or even new to programming as you can learn first-hand from other people’s experience and ask a lot of questions.

So is all of the above true? Well, I can say it is.

I did pair programming at Makers Academy yesterday. My pair wasn’t really a pair as we were three people but the more the merrier. We started looking at level 6 katas at codewars and to be honest I would have lost my way if I have been on my own. But thanks to @bat020 and @phillipclarke29 that didn’t happen. I discovered that I have my own way to approach a problem and use the help of numeral methods whereas the other two had a list of their own. So when we combined our expertise and explained to the rest what and why something was happening, we finished the challenge in no time.

As a result, I am looking forward to next week as I will programme every day and this will help me to ‘miss’ the wall rather than hit it with a big BOOOM.

Zhivko