Today I had an abbreviated day of pairing with Zack, after my original pairing partner was having a day not well suited for pairing. The benefit to starting my pairing two months rather than two weeks before the end of my apprenticeship is that the value of my experience with each pair can remain high in instances like this. This is the third person with whom I have changed pairing days with due to either a day with meetings or other responsibilities that limited keyboard time, unexpected schedule conflicts, or a lack of stories in the log.

I have always know this about myself, but just to set the mood, I am not incredibly well suited for pairing. It brings up all of my insecurities, and usually my nervous thoughts translate to poor performance. From the beginning of my apprenticeship, and my mentors can attest to this, I have been saying that I think more deliberately than my peers, so I tend to not contribute well in a pairing situation. I have come to realize that in this type of environment, and in agile development, this is going to be a major handicap for me. I am not worried about my own personal handicap, because I can put in the time, but rather any implications this would have on my pair or team. Hopefully I will get more comfortable with more knowledge and experience.

Today I was pairing with my mentor, whom I already belive to be a wizard, so I knew I would learn a lot. Zack is one of the most capable people I have met, and I am constantly impressed by his problem solving abilities. Throughout the day, his team members were asking him all flavors of questions and he either had the knowledge or the experience to be able to address them. I feel so lucky to have him on my side of the field.

We worked on his client application, which is a sort of insurance platform, though it does not legally qualify as insurance. The specific project that they were working on today was something that I had previously thought was the basis of the whole application. This particular feature will allow members to submit what they call “needs”, essentially a claim, for a medical bill that he or she had received, and the claim would be reviewed and processed for reimbursement. There are three tracks of claims that can be made, and we were working on the illness track.

I said that I thought that this was the foundation of what the application was because it consistently surprises me how long and expensive software projects. I am told that this particular client has been with 8th Light for over 6 years, and we currently have almost ten developers working on different parts of the web application, so it has been very eye opening for me to see how detailed the work of an individual developer can get. I guess I was thinking that developers were solving huge, complex problems daily, but it seems that a lot of the work is just tedious or repetitive tasks. That is actually reassuring because I was worried that I would be in way over my head when I start on client work.

Zack gave me my first introduction to CoffeeScript, which he admitted would not be his tool of choice if he could start over again, but it was what they had to work with. This seems to be a consistent theme so far, working with what you are given.

I also got my first glimpse into a two-hour-until-deadline push. This was really interesting to witness because I was trying to follow along with the conversations that were happening, both between the members of the team at 8th Light, and those with the product managers of the company. The hastened deadline was due to a desire on the manager’s part to demo the product the following morning.

The reason, it seems, that this would be something that one would push back on, is because even though the feature was nearly complete locally, we still had to deal with getting everything configured, pushed and merged into the QA server, which could have brought on some additional and unforseen issues. In fact, they did have to work around an issue that disabled the server for a large chunk of the time, however they were able to overcome the problem and get a passable version up for demo. Other concerns would be buggy or ugly rushed code that could possibly cause future heartache.

I did not do a lot of coding today due to the last minute pair switch and last minute deadline change. Zack probably sensed the fear that was seeping through my skin today. I think that tomorrow will bring more keyboard time.