Programming

17022 readers

602 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Random Question: is it weird I don't like pair programming? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

30 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've been working in programming for a few years and I think I really dislike Pair Programming; I understand how it is but I often find it mind-numbingly dull. I have a feeling I'm doing it wrong but I feel like as a part of a dev team tasks should be broken into discrete enough chunks that a single person can just blitz through the work... Maybe it's just me, what are y'all thoughts on the matter?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've always felt that pair programming is more useful on early stages of a task, where there is enough doubt about implementation details and discussing them is worth.

This way it felt more of a meeting between two persons discussing details first, while testing them live to check if we were on track second, instead of programming first and discussing second.

By the time we stand on the screen without talking too much we just stepped aside and separate the task if needed.

Any other kind of forced pair programming feels wrong, either because the task was already planned enough to no create enough discussion, or because it was small enough and the discussion was not worth. I've found myself on situations where "we needed" to make a task in pair programming and was dull as you say.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've always felt that pair programming is more useful on early stages of a task, where there is enough doubt about implementation details and discussing them is worth.

Is pair programming the right way to address unknowns around implementation? It seems like a brainstorming / whiteboarding session might be a better fit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

More like unknowns about implementation details. Defining in brainstorming sessions how we want a solution makes sense, but I don't imagine talking about details.

I was referring more about discussing the details inside of an already defined solution, like, for example, trying to use a library, which one we use, or how would be implemented in detail something.