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by jacques_chester 2692 days ago
My experience is that PRs quickly turn into a chokepoint which breeds delays and rework. Genuine bugs are rarely found, almost all the feedback is idiom and clarity -- valuable, but I can get the same feedback synchronously from a pair.

Note the reference to frequently committing to HEAD. That's not an accident, it encourages everyone to rebase frequently, keep changes small and to surface problems almost immediately. Whereas PRs quickly go stale and it turns into a game to try and get your PR in first.
1 comments
scarface74 2692 days ago
And having two developers pair programming instead of them both working on separate releasable features is more efficient?
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jacques_chester 2692 days ago
In my experience of the past 5 years: yes. Substantially better idea-to-production latency, given a high minimum standard for releaseability.

Little's Law is instructive. There are two ways to increase throughput in a system. One is to reduce latency. The other is to increase in-process inventory. They have very different dynamics.

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scarface74 2692 days ago
Most software development like everything else is a combination of inspiration and perspiration. How much time is spent in average day coming up with “ideas” versus just doing the work?

Or putting it in production terms, the number of people coming up with ideas for the iPhone in Cupertino is dwarfed by the number of people building them in China.

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jacques_chester 2692 days ago
I'm not sure what you're driving at here.
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scarface74 2692 days ago
That you don’t need pair programming to do much of the grunt work that’s involved in development. Do you really need help making sure you write a for loop correctly?
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jacques_chester 2692 days ago
I do if I'm about to do it wrong, or if something other than a loop might be better, or to write the test that drives it out, or to show me a trick I didn't know, or to get me unstuck, or to tell me there's a library function that lets us skip a loop, or ...

Is your argument that I don't know how pairing works? Because my estimate is that I have around 8,000 hours practicing it at this point, which I suspect may be 8,000 hours or so more than your own professional pairing experience. It's possible that I've been sleep-walking through the whole thing, but unlikely. One of the dozens of intelligent, helpful people I've worked with would've pointed it out.

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