The second stop on my pairing tour was with Eric Meyer, who was 8th Light’s first official apprentice. Eric has been embedded with a client for at least the past year and it’s a pretty big company. Pairing with him was an opportunity to get a glimpse of a large code base and also witness how a company of that size operates.

The first thing that jumped out at me was the broad range of skill sets and positions of all the people that attend each meeting. Each person or team is responsible for a certain section of a product, but then it seems like each person reports to, works with, and maybe even manages more people. However, the important lesson that jumped out at me was the amount of trust that everyone has to have in the other members of the company. To this company’s credit, it seemed like the level of trust was very high and it was impressive to see how efficiently members of different teams and from different specialities could come together, communicate and move through a topic.

If the first day of my pairing tour was all about writing then the second day was definitely more about reading. Eric and I spent a good portion of the day working on tracking down some unexpected behavior that users had reported. It was great watching Eric quickly read through a large and complex app: he confidently navigated through the different classes and quickly parsed the necessary methods to track down what he was looking for. I know that this is a skill that simply takes time to develop- but it was a good reminder that I should find as many opportunities as I can to read through other people’s code.

To finish off the day Eric paired with me on making my HTTP Server pass the latest Cob Spec test that Will added in. It was great to do a pretty typical ping-pong pairing session where one of us wrote the test and the other person made it pass. The new Cob spec also lead us in to some refactoring that allowed me to work on yesterday’s lesson: deleting!