A place for developers to talk about building on Farcaster.

/dev

What are your thoughts/experiences with pair programming (with humans)?

I've never done it. I always fund the idea of it quite wasteful.

I find code reviews significantly better since they're asynchronous, can involve more than two people and it all gets documented so knowledge transfer is significantly higher than pair programming.

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I think it’s better for learning together or teaching. 

I don’t think it’s productive for work.

As a daily practice, no way too inefficient

As an occasional experience, builds rapport with colleagues, opportunity to share knowledge and makes cruising through some changes much easier

👨‍💻 /uno and /outside, @unofficial

For spreading context around what the code does. I think a light weight design review process can help even more than code reviews.

For code reviews at Google there were policies around language readability, code ownership and not being able to submit code unilaterally even if you're the owner and have readability.

I liked both requiring the owner stamp and the readability stamp not necessarily the unilateral policy.

The readability process was good since it helped learn best practices. The owner stamp  was good because the owner could share their context and ensure the new code fit well and didn't make wrong assumptions.

what was/is your code culture that made PRs successful? did leadership push it or set by the teams?

It’s amazing. Watching someone else use tools nearly always teaches me tricks. 

Seeing how others think and approach problems also helps. At a minimum it helps you understand why they suck and you can coach them better. At best it teaches you ways you can improve

I really enjoy it, and it is not a replacement for code reviews. They both have their benefits.

Having someone else on the team with full context on a feature is radically different than someone looking through a change set for errors.

It also allows for instant feedback and direction. Plus it can be a lot of fun.

Early on I was at shops that mandated pairing at almost all times. We joked that the main benefit of it was that we could bill twice as much.

I agree with you in that whatever training benefits it has are eroded by the lack of a written record. These days I tend to make a small document or repository and then we might have a quick meeting going over that.

It's ok for specific teaching sessions

Pair/mob only tends to be the norm in extremely dysfunctional teams that can't get anything done otherwise, or when management can't evaluate output and hope people will watch each other from dodging work (some consultancies even sell this "benefit" to clients)