Last week was my first time going to 8th Light’s Libertyville office, today will hopefully be my last. I don’t have an issue with the office itself, just long commutes seem incredibly inefficient to me.

Today I paired with Colin. Colin is the company’s CTO, and as such, I had a hard time pinning him down for an pairing appointment on a day where we could actually work on code. My encore appearance in Libertyville can be attributed to that note.

I was expecting to have to run around and context switch a bunch with Colin, but it actually worked out where we were in front of a keyboard almost the whole day. We were able to work on an internal 8th Light application that had been on the back burner for a while, with many hands touching the story we tackled. We did not finish the story, but I think that the momentum created from today’s pairing session will carry over with Colin. He seems like that kind of person.

Colin was a very interesting person to pair with because he moves at an unhumanly pace. Not only does he generate and change thoughts incredibly efficiently, but he also moves throughout the code base with a ridiculous fluidity. Besides that, Colin is highly expressive; every move he made while we were pairing was vocalized. That made up, to a degree, for the fact that he was moving and working faster than my brain could process. The stream of consciousness was so thorough that I would have a hard time believing that he could fit additional thoughts in between his words.

That type of pairing flow reminds me of “engineering empathy” sessions we used to have at Dev Bootcamp. One of the talks we had was regarding the difference in pairing workflow between an introvert and an extrovert. We generalized that introverts are more deliberate with thoughts and suggestions, whereas extroverts gave more freely whatever thoughts came to them, without real regard to the quality of the thought.

That last part reminded me of pairing with Colin, he was tossing a lot of ideas out, whether or not they were solid ideas, and he was vocal the whole time, constantly contributing. I, on the other hand, was far more measured in my input. I will attribute that more to the fact that Colin has over a decade more experience, than that he fits into a specific personality category. While I agree that personality is important for pairing, I will not make such generalizations.

I aspire to be like that. I feel like it comes with confidence. Confidence for me comes in waves. I have had a bunch of highs where I have felt like 8th Light would be crazy not to hire me, but also just as many lows where I have thought that I was not worthy of this opportunity. There have been enough positive forces in my apprenticeship to where those dips don’t last long. I am 18 months into learning code, and I know I have a lot to learn, but I have also come a very long way.