But my pair-partner did and now I use (and share the joy of) Ctrl-D all the time!Earlier this week, I joined Zee Spencer in our live-streamed co-learning series, Debugging Downtime.
Many years ago, I happened to get a glimpse into my manager’s problem-solving process as he was diving into a production problem.
“Next time that happens, can I join you so I can learn about this?” I asked.
A time or two later, and I’d learned enough about what kinds of questions you can ask yourself to create hypotheses around production problems.
It’s hard to teach suspicion outside of a pairing environment.
Pairing helps distribute knowledge that can’t be easily obtained.
Sometimes that’s practical, hands-on problem-solving that makes sense when you work on a problem together.
Sometimes it’s an internal software ecosystem that isn’t documented internally and has no external users.
Pairing helps me get to that hard-to-obtain knowledge, and can be a part of your plan to reduce the pains and dangers of your team’s knowledge silos.
I love pairing because it helps me be my best imaginable self.
Sometimes that’s patching in a personal gap in knowledge, and sometimes it’s the encouragement that comes from validating that the problem we’re facing really is hard.
The memories that stand out to me over the years are not from striving solo in the dark, but of facing the big bad problems together with a pairing buddy.
Roses are redThis expression is true:Pairing brings out our bestWhich is why I like to pair program with you ❤Roses are… close enough to red, ship itOriginally published at www.
wecohere.
com.
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