The past couple of weeks in the fellowship, we have been running through exercises in a pair programming setup. With one person driving and another one navigating, teams of two assigned at random walked through various exercises on Code Wars. This week in particular, we had an interesting experience of pair programming on "the stage" where 2 people worked together in front of the group for 3 minutes at a time. When the 3 minutes was up, the driver left the stage, the navigator became the driver, and the first person in line was the new navigator.
After this experience, I feel like pair programming is definitely my preferred way to program. I love working with other people, and sometimes it can be a little draining to be working on a problem by yourself. With someone looking over your shoulder, it takes some of the pressure off of finding the problem. If you are stumped, you can voice your thoughts out loud and bounce ideas off of your partner to get past the roadblocks. It also helps to have an extra person researching syntax or possible solutions to the problem while the other one is in the weeds trying to solve the issue at hand.
Even being up on "the stage" was an enjoyable experience. The extra pressure of being in front of everyone and having a time crunch felt as close as we can get to a real-world situation with deadlines on the horizon. It was also an interesting experience because we were able to get practice on working on code that someone else had worked on previously.
The past couple of weeks have definitely been my favorite so far! I am really excited to use pair programming techniques in my job going forward.
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