Pair-coding, because teamwork is awesome!

When I joined VI Company in 2009 I was the first employee full-time committed to front-end development. So whenever I was presented a problem, it was up to me to find a suitable solution.

While it usually worked out well, I do recall a few instances of banging my head against the wall because I dug myself a deep coding hole from which I was scrambling to get back out of…

A year in which I learned a lot of new things went by, after which Laurens joined our team as a second front-end developer. We soon started to see the potential of working together on some of the tough challenges that came on our path.

It’s all a matter of perspective

You might feel that two front-end developers working on the same problem is ineffective, only one person can operate the computer you’re coding on right? And it’s true, it càn be ineffective: there have been moments where it felt like one of us was just watching the other person type. But most of the time we managed to crack these so called “hard nuts” much faster because the other one brings in a new perspective to solving the issues at hand.

Getting to the solution faster isn’t the only upside of pair-coding to us – I dare to say that we both improved a lot at our job in a relatively short period of time, because when we are pair-coding it’s often like a peer review where we’re quick to point out mistakes or oddities in each others code, thereby preventing our code from getting too messy or inefficient.

Maybe we should throw it all away?

There have been numerous times going over an older piece of code, seriously wondering if we wouldn’t be better off rewriting it from scratch. And sometimes we did, too. It might feel a bit odd to throw away code that’s “working fine”, but it feels great when you decide to revise your code and you manage to come up with something that’s so much better instead.

Obviously, rewriting code from scratch isn’t always a viable option, so revising small bits of code when you get the chance will suffice in many cases. Do strife to update your code or tell your team mates how to achieve better results when you spot something that could be handled better.

Involving team members

Since Laurens and I are both front-end developers, working together on front-end issues was obvious. However, I recently discovered just how much you can learn from working on front-end issues with a programmer as well. In my case Ivo or Mendelt.

Since they both are damn fine C# developers, they offer a whole new way to look at projects using languages like JavaScript. I’ve done some pair-coding on a few different projects with them, and often found that I was learning (and soon applying) so much from the way they were handling code. It would probably have taken quite a while longer to figure out all those things on my own. Instead I learned many new and neat tricks from working on these projects with them for a couple of hours.

Get off your island

I hope I have given you a small insight in how efficient and beneficial pair-coding can be when trying to solve tough coding problems. I encourage you to get off your island and give pair-coding a shot! You might find it just as big of a revelation as I did when I first started working together more closely with Laurens, Ivo & Mendelt.