Enjoying Who You Work With in Software Development
This was co-written by and
As students at Flatiron School we get to pair program for our first two projects. This gave us a little taste of how important it would be to get along with the person you are working with. This proves a much easier environment to accomplish greater tasks in and push projects further than expected.
For our Module 2 project we got paired together and came up with the idea of creating a trading card website. After brainstorming together we realized it would be easiest to make cards of scientist, rather than athletes. This way we wouldn’t have to deal with statistics of players and could more easily hand seed our database.
We partnered together to get the information for our seeds, focusing on using Encyclopedia Britannica for most of our information. We utilized Slack to share information to add to our seed file, by sending it through private message.
Through this process we realized how much fun we were having so we decided to pair program our entire project. This proved to be a good choice and also made us realize that if you enjoy who you are working with the project flow is more productive and smooth.
We each got to utilize each others strengths to push our project past limits we had initially set. We needed to create a web application that used JavaScript and Ruby on Rails CRUD (create, read, update, destroy) and were able to create full CRUD with both relationships our app had (user and scientist cards). We also included event listeners, which at the time were advanced concepts we had yet to learn. This also helped us learn from each other and grow as developers in the process, by turning each of our weaknesses into strengths.
This is evidence that two brains are better one if they can find a way to work together. When you are pair programming and your partner is not reliable, it makes attaining basic goals harder to achieve, and making something more advanced almost impossible.
