Comment by dylan604
Comment by dylan604 a day ago
I've never done official pair programming, but I get frustrated when I'm not on the keyboard as I find others think slower.
Comment by dylan604 a day ago
I've never done official pair programming, but I get frustrated when I'm not on the keyboard as I find others think slower.
Have you tried plugging in a second keyboard and taking over where necessary? I do a lot of remote work in which my colleague and I work on the same computer and it's quite useful for either of us to jump in with our own keyboard (and mouse). It does take a bit of occasional verbal negotiation to agree on who really knows what to do (and can do it fastest) but if you communicate well then it's pretty easy.
There is evidence that two people on the keyboard can increase productivity.
I do this, but with a second monitor and second machine, and then we use git to synchronize our work
The wildest thing I experienced once was this experimental “two cursors, two highlights, two clipboards” setup. I badly wish that had caught on. It was like Google Docs but Local Multiplayer.
One of my previous employers, Dynaboard, built approximately that.
The Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30261598
If you enjoy Tuple, we just silently open-sourced Hopp (one of the maintainers here), we are still in Beta era, but would love some feedback!
Tuple.app does this. It's pricey but an excellent product.
I find the less dominant person just switches off, stops thinking and just becomes a keyboard with about 20x the latency and 10% the speed and accuracy.
for me it's not that I think faster, it's just that I will check 10 things really fast and exclude the "no it can't be there" things - because that's usually where it is. So if somebody else is holding the mouse and keyboard, I would then have to convince them that these things that they are convinced are fine need checking.
I really hate this work of convincing them, because it's much faster to check it first and explain why it was a good idea later once I've fixed the problem.
I usually prefer to be navigator than driver. It's the navigator that does the high level thinking. The one at the keyboard is the one who's usually better at typing and writing out the design patterns that are agreed upon. Of course we did swap roles routinely, maybe several times a day. Oh and to top it off we switched pairing partners every week or two. It was a brutal experiment but I learned a lot and I'd say it was a great success.