As part of some contract work I’m doing for one of my clients, I am pairing with one of the new developers in the company to bring them up to speed on the code base.
I can’t say anything new about paired programming in general that someone else hasn’t already said, but I can say this: it is freaking awesome. Others seem to agree.
I want to talk about my paired programming setup. We tried VNC, but it apparently sucks a lot these days. It was flakey and kept dropping connections. No idea what that was about. It also required all kinds of firewall fiddling I have no love for.
Sean Chambers told me about SharedView and Tokbox on twitter, and while I haven’t used Tokbox yet, I must say SharedView has rocked my world. It’s so cool! No firewall baloney, you only share what you want to share, and it’d dead simple.
We use Skype for voice communication, which is always clear and well behaved. I love Skype for video chats, too. With a modern webcam, the quality is so amazing.
The combination has worked great, and combined I think we have dramatically reduced the friction of remote operating.
This guy is hardly the first one to say it, but he’s right: if you want to save yourself lots of time, remap Visual Studio’s F1 key away from help. We all know the Visual Studio help system sucks hard, so just give up on it. Welcome to a world where a missed ESC slap doesn’t paralyze your computer for 2 painfully grueling minutes.
But what to remap it to? So many ideas!
Sock it to me now!
I have a client wanting a website on a very small budget, so I recommended using logoyes.com to create the logo for the business. They are cheap, and last time I used them was relatively straightforward.
Not this time. The payment processor marked my card as fraud for whatever dark reason payment processors do, and the software provided no means of recourse. The excellent customer service representatives were hamstrung by a web application which provided no ability to manage any of these common issues.
It reminded me a great deal of Ayende’s PayPal Post
Anyway, here is the email I sent to logoyes after borrowing my partner’s credit card so I could perform a business transaction:
Thank you [Very Nice Customer Service Rep Name].
As I said on the phone, I had to call several times in order to get this purchase sorted out. The customer service representatives were very kind, patient and helpful. I cannot speak more highly of the customer service representatives employed by logoyes.
However, as a software developer, I feel ashamed that someone in my profession was paid money to write the logoyes.com software. The fact that I can spend quite a bit of time creating a logo and getting approval from a client, only to have the payment processor mess up and not have that logo saved anywhere, or provide the customer service reps with any ability to help me in that situation is ridiculous.
I understand that payment processors are pretty tricky things, but a false positive on fraud is such a common occurence it’s a complete oversight to not have any other way for a customer (which in my case had already invested at least 2 hours into the process) to pay for their logo is incredulous.
I will not be buying another logo from logoyes, which is unfortunate because I’ve been pretty pleased with the results. However, for such a low cost product, I cannot risk investing more hours into the logo and suddenly have no way to download it. It makes no business sense.
Thank you,
James Thigpen
As part of some contract work I’m doing for one of my clients, I am pairing with one of the new developers in the company to bring them up to speed on the code base.