We also worked on two operating systems with him on Linux and me on the Mac. This was awkward at times, but most of the tools (RubyMine and the command line) were identical. I did end up buying a spare Mac keyboard which helped since the keys are in different places.

By the way, Wolf will be visiting Hashrocket the week after next and you can ask him about it yourself!

Thanks for stopping by and continuing the conversation.

Sarah

I’m interested to hear what Wolf was using when he came in and if you had to adapt to learn a new tool as well? A slight speed bump when pairing is when developers have character maps (dvorak vs. qwerty) or might use different tools in their local user’s profile..

Once Tim Pope (maker of Rails.vim) joined us, we started migrating towards Vi since he wanted to use Vi. Pairing has helped all of us become MUCH better at it. So there are some definite fringe benefits to pairing other than bouncing ideas off each other, cranking through features, or writing great code.

Also, check out some of the stuff Corey Haines has been doing. He’s been traveling A LOT to pair with a lot of people and documenting the most of it!

In many ways I’m just passing on what I learned from others before, like the folks at Pivotal Labs that really showed me the ropes in pair programming, Agile development, leveraging Rails to the fullest. Some practical considerations that I find key are:

Equal access to the machine by either pairing partner–that includes the physical seating position in front of the monitor and of course dual keyboards and mice–but also things like common tools so that either partner feels more or less at home. This might just be the time to look at IDE’s such as RubyMine and leave Emacs and vi for editing config files on remote servers. I also like the Mac/Linux environment we’ve had. Adapting to the Mac keyboard when coming from Linux is easy enough, but dealing with backslashes and other quirks of Windows might cut into your ROI more than switching to a Mac/Linux environment would be.