How pair programming helped me focus more

Originally posted on my personal blog http://haidrali.com/how-pair-programming-helped-me-focus-more/.

I am a big advocate of pair programming as I always feel more productive doing tasks in a pair because it tends to be a Get Things Done kind of attitude. Followings are reasons why I believe pair programming can help you more productive at certain stages

1- The purpose of two programmers sitting on a single workstation is not always to get output greater than output of both individuals but to get the critical work done i.e, setting up your first deployment environment, debugging a rare and critical bug, code merge or code reviews etc

2- If pair consists of a senior developer with a junior developer the follow of knowledge from senior to junior developer really help junior developer to learn. This is what I have experienced while working almost a year with Waqas Farooq he be a Geek and I as new-grad

3- Many a time I have experienced that Unforced Errors like unintentionally making changes to another file, environment variables not loading in production are greatly reduced when a pair sit-down on a single workstation

4- Almost everyone uses social media be it Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Hacker News etc during work to get some comfort and once your dive into it then it become difficult to get out of this comfort zone. But when you sit together with your fellow programmer the follow of work never stop and social media and other hurdles never come in your way you just keep going until you hit the finish line.

5- Concept of pair programming gets redefined under remote working environment as you are no longer sitting together physically but still you can be on a single workstation by the means of online realtime collaboration tools i.e. screen sharing

I hope my experience would help promoting pair programming culture at your workplace.

Happy Pair Programming :)