For my most recent pairing tour adventure, I met up with Stephen in Libertyville, a commute that I had been avoiding with vigor for the past eight months. Of everyone in the office, I probably have spoken to Stephen the least. The Libertyville office is a couple of hours away and I don’t blame him for opting to not take the trip.

One benefit that I had with pairing with Stephen is that he is working on the same client that both my mentor and Brian are, but they each were working on different parts of the application on different teams. Stephen’s team worked more on the internal apps, though when I paired with Zack, we were working towards a similar goal.

I really did not know what to expect from himbklae needed to encorporate a library that another team member had made to manage endpoints, which caused us to have to make changes to several unexpected areas of the code in order to accomodate the changes. Adding this feature brought this part of the application up to date with how the rest of the app was framed. Overall the work seemed rather tedious, and Stephen definitely had to recognize all of the pieces that were necessary.

My takeaway from pairing with Stephen is that even crafters take a while to get accustomed to the code base. I expressed my awe with him at how fluidly he seemed to move about the application, and he noted that such fluidity took practice. 8th Light is his first job coming out of college, and he noted that he shared some of the uncertanty that I currently feel about my apprenticeship.

I left today with the reminder that anyone, even myself, can learn to code. I sometimes struggle with knowing what is a real problem that I need help with versus something that I am just blocking myself on, like not reading the error or not considering the output. I have to get better at recognizing the difference because once I can differentiate, I will look at the manageable problems with more confidence.

It is pretty excellent yet worrying the effect that confidence plays on my ability and output. That is something I will have to reflect on more as my career progresses. For now, I know that the more I see, the more confidence I will have, and the more skill I have, which also increases confidence.