Spun

Mark and I did our first bi-coastal pair programming session last week with him in Brooklyn and me here in San Diego. I donned the headset, we called one another on the phone (yay free long distance), and with his Mac as a VNC server (using OS X VNC), I connected to his machine. For the most part he drove while we talked, read docs, coded and tested.

At first it was a little uncomfortable, because Mark felt like he was performing and I felt like a voyeur. I’ve trained myself to look away from people’s screens, so it was strange to watch him type and mouse legitimately. Once we got through the initial weirdness, though, it was one of the most productive co-coding sessions I’ve ever had. It’s amazing what two sets of eyes can do. And your frustration level never goes very high, either, because you have someone else joking about things. (Like when we couldn’t get our first unit test to succeed for the umpteenth time, he simply said, “Mark is angry,” which sent me into a fit of giggles.) Performance for the most part was good, except for switching between windows, which sometimes lagged as my viewer had to redraw things. Mark was also using Vonage to talk to me, so presumably that hogged up a bunch of his bandwidth.

This weekend, I drive and he uses the cell phone. Yay pair programming!