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.

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.