Friday the 26th was a fun day at Icosystem. Through a random chain of events Corey Haines stopped by as part of his pair programming tour. I had the opportunity to pair with him for a few hours and talk a lot of shop.
Pairing is always a fun activity and it's really fun to pair with someone you've never paired with before. Not only do you get some work done, but you get a nice view into some else's coding process, asthetic, and you always learn a few new tricks. I picked up two things from Corey that I'll be trying out:
- When doing a refactoring, only allowing one test to be failing at a time. It's hard to do, but I liked how it felt.
- The pomodoro technique - Work for 25 min, take a 5 min break, use a timer. I installed Pomodoro 0.24 for OS X. It puts a nice little timer in my application (what is that thing called?) bar. Maybe it's a great process or maybe it's just something new, but so far it's a nice tool and is keeping me focused. Another nice feature of it is you note what the task is you're working on. I don't know about you but I have to fill out timesheets for billing, any tool that helps with that is great!
Because of Corey's visit I met a bunch of the Ruby folk in the Boston area. It really made me realize how lacking the Java community is in having a... community. I might have to start going to the bostonrb meetings just to hang out with folks who like to talk about coding. Maybe they won't mind having a Java hacker in their midst :P
Writing this post took me, 27 minutes, I'm terrible at the Pomodoro technique
2 comments:
I had a great time there! I'm looking forward to coming back and pairing again. Thanks for having me!
haha! 27 minutes. did you take your 5 minute break?
Zach! I have the pomodoro timer. I use it for cooking, I love it. It was a wedding gift. I think I will give a try to using it while working. Although when it rings, it usually means something good is cooked :)
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