

Tom Dale and Yehuda Katz's Pairing Setup - nixme
http://tomdale.net/2012/01/tildes-pairing-setup/

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phren0logy
At the risk of adding very little, I'll say that I just got that same 3.4GHz
iMac at work (with just the SSD) and it has RUINED me on everything else. It's
the best computer I've ever used, including and since my Commodore 64.

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fbuilesv
Is pairing efficient when the two developers use different editors (or even
different keybindings)? I feel my IQ drop by 30 points when I can't use my
customized Emacs and I dont know if the benefits of pairing are enough to
counter this.

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smerritt
Given a sufficiently large monitor, it's fine. I (Emacs user) routinely pair
with a Vim-using coworker; we just put Emacs on one half of the screen and Vim
on the other.

The only thing you need after that is for both editors to automatically
refresh when a file changes on disk. With Emacs, you can get that with
"(global-auto-revert-mode 1)" in your init.el. You can make Vim auto-refresh
too, though I'm not sure how.

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briandoll
:set autoread

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dotBen
The key bit of information that was missed from the piece is that, I'm
guessing, the iMac is linked up _in mirror mode_ to the Thunderbolt display on
the other person's desk... so they are each seeing the same thing on their own
computer.

From the photo it wasn't clear if one person had the iMac and the other had a
MacBook plugged into the Thunderbolt display -- which left me wondering how
they were actually pair-programming.

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tomdale
Updated to be more clear; thanks!

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bentlegen
How many startups here use pairing? Anecdotal evidence tells me its mostly
used by consultancies (Pivotal Labs and Hashrocket are others that come to
mind).

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matthewcford
That is because pairing helps mitigate risks (human error), when you're being
paid to build software no client like to pay for bug fixing, they would rather
pay a bit more to make sure there are less errors (or at least appear more bug
free).

If you're a bootstrapped start-up, it is not an efficient use of time to be
pairing 100% of the time. We tend to only pair on 'core' parts of apps or
'hard' problems, or when someone needs another pair of eyes on something (two
heads etc), otherwise clients budgets are quickly exhausted on pairing for
pairing's sake.

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moe
Ah, this finally explains those Ember-commits by a guy called 'tomhuda'!

Btw, I love that slight Statler/Waldorf-vibe in your story, i.e. running vim
with two file-browsers because you can't agree on one. ;-)

