[LRUG] "Designer code": with Ruby refactoring exercises

[Chris Parsons]

On 7 January 2011 09:53, Priit Tamboom <priit at mx.ee> wrote:

> > 6:30pm in Southwark. It's called "Designer Code", and is all about how we
> > can design our code to have great User Experience. There'll be some fun
> ruby
> > refactoring exercises to do as part of the workshop.
>
> Thanks for organisers, it was really nice and useful refactoring
> exercise indeed.
>

You're welcome! It was fun to teach.


> What bothers me personally is that all those teams who are doing
> ping-pong, pair or other fancy stuff are using SINGLE machine only per
> pair. Basically it means I or other team members don't have much
> freedom left for developing own comfortable working environment.
> Basically now I should start worry about what is the latest "popular"
> flavours out there etc, what a nuisance.
>

This is an interesting problem we've solved a couple of different ways
@Eden.

1) Central pairing iMacs: this worked well for a while: they were standard
installs and everything was the same. Got old after a while as we ended up
having vimrc fights and people like to customize the environment they're in.

2) Laptop on big screen + two keyboards + one other laptop: also good: one
person uses their own laptop and drives a fair bit, the other uses their
laptop for research and a bit of typing.

3) tmux + vim: this works really well. Basically you have a shared terminal
screen open on your own laptop with which you can both interact. You still
get full control over your machine for looking at browser output and
browsing/research. Works brilliantly remotely too, if you can go through the
hassle of setting it up.

All these require a fair amount of editor/tool similarity in the team.
Generally speaking we've shied away from overly customized environments for
this reason. We tend to stick to vim without too many plugins, or remapping
of common keys. Occasionally we switch back to textmate if that works better
for people. I've learnt to use built in/generic functionality more and more
with editors, and rely less on plugins for entirely this reason: it keeps
the learning curve flat for your pair.

Does anybody got statistics to show how many and what type of teams
> really using pair style?
>

Eden pairs on almost all production code, and a lot of non-production code,
too. Our guideline is: if you can think of a good reason not to pair, then
don't. If not, pair.

Hope that helps
Chris

-- 
Chris Parsons
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