Week 488

Both Chrises were away all week, Chris R on paternity leave and Chris L on holiday in Portugal, leaving Ben and I to hold the fort. We spent the majority of the week continuing work on the project for BBC R&D.

Ben and I chose to do a lot of pair programming, because we were working on an unfamiliar part of the codebase. During the week we did quite a bit of simplifying and refactoring - it’s easy to carried away with this kind of thing, but I think we did a good job of focussing on changes that would make it easier to add each piece of functionality.

We also spent quite a bit of time fixing warnings and generally improving the signal-to-noise ratio of the test output. This is a real bugbear of mine and development felt so much easier once it was done.

This was probably the most pair programming I’ve done in a while and the first time I’ve worked with Ben since the early/heady days of Reevoo about 10 years ago! It reminded me how much I enjoy pair programming and I learnt loads from Ben during the week. Although at one point I think we both got a bit frustrated with an obscure problem configuring Ben’s editor to use ESLint, all in all I thoroughly enjoyed the experience!

Later in the week Rob D was in town and he spent a couple of days working in our office. He was doing a lot of remote pair programming with a team of client developers, so it was interesting to hear about his experiences of that.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Until next time…

– James