How to avoid pair-programming

I always hope to find ways to help my colleagues enjoy their working day. I know that sometimes, some of them wish not to pair-program with me. Here's a helpful checklist of gentle ways to stop that happening, for those who don't wish to just tell me.

• Be left handed - it's too inefficient to move the mouse from one side to another all the time
• Don't use a mouse - any other pointing gadget will do, as I hate them all
• Use a dark colour scheme - I can't read that navy blue on black look
• Upgrade your IDE - if F12 or Ctrl-Shift-F10 don't work for me, I'm off
• Work from home - never been know to fail

How to avoid pair-programming

I always hope to find ways to help my colleagues enjoy their working day. I know that sometimes, some of them wish not to pair-program with me. Here's a helpful checklist of gentle ways to stop that happening, for those who don't wish to just tell me.

• Be left handed - it's too inefficient to move the mouse from one side to another all the time
• Don't use a mouse - any other pointing gadget will do, as I hate them all
• Use a dark colour scheme - I can't read that dark blue on black look
• Upgrade your IDE - if F12 or Ctrl-Shift-F10 don't work for me, I'm off
• Work from home - never been know to fail

A new way to delete code

It's a complicated set-up to the punchline, but stay with me.

We have several iOS frameworks now, and use Carthage to update a dependent project.

The Carthage update takes ten minutes (why?).

We need to work on four related projects, so someone has the clever idea of a symbolic link of each project's Carthage folder to a shared one.

All is well. So we add shared project code to the shared location, with its own GitHub repo. Xcode neatly pushes and pulls from both.

We work on project A, including the shared code, while having project B open to check it still compiles.

After a long morning, just before lunch, we notice that project B has uncommitted changes. Assuming they're just fiddles, we discard all changes.

If you get the joke, insert your sound effect here. I favour the mechanised EH-EHH from the Family Fortunes TV show.

If you aren't sure what happened: the discard was on the shared code, being the morning's changes on project A.

TLDR: to err is human, to really screw things up needs a computer

Why my three-ball juggling is improving

Back in the day, when compiling and linking C programs took a couple of minutes, everyone in my company was able to juggle three balls competently. A neurologist I met found this interesting - she said it was a deliberate exercise of a different part of the brain.

Then for a few years computers were fast enough that there wasn't time to juggle.

Now, Apple's Xcode and Swift are reintroducing the need for juggling. The AppStore requires screenshots in multiple formats. Kudos to the fastlane.tools for snapshot, which automates it. But it's not exactly instant. Here are screenshots from the beginning and end of the process:

8 minutes and 10 seconds, for one screenshot across six devices.

Or maybe Apple just want me to buy a faster Mac?

A day without learning

Normally, I take the view it's all about learning. If a colleague asks "what would happen if?" my response is "let's find out".

Recently, a day before a client demonstration, we had an idea for an app, and realised we could probably build it in a day. Sleeves were rolled up, the spike investigation was completed, and we started building. Suddenly, I became intolerant of tangents and digressions. With an eye on the clock, I just announced that such fripperies could wait for another day.

And we built our app. 11am to 4:30pm, fully functional all the way down to the icon. I was delighted.

On reflection, I realised that we had learned something important: that we could build that, "soup to nuts", in a day. Counter-intuitive conclusion: you can learn by banning learning.

GitHub: ugly name, beautiful concept

With each passing month, I like GitHub more and more.

I  like the three clicks of Project > Source Control > Commit, but also the command line to see the state exactly.

Releases and Carthage play well together for me.

I love the searching of project code. It's much faster than doing the same on my Mac Mini.

Heavens, I even nearly created a branch the other day. I prefer to work in small steps so branches aren't needed, but I've heard that GitHub does them well. So the time isn't far away.

The only problem is the name. What's its cute diminutive, do you think? Hubby? Gitbo?

Saved by the yellow bar

First, let's remind ourselves that XCode can't hold a candle to Visual Studio. Agreed? Good.

But praise where praise is due. The other day the little yellow warning bar did pick up an error that might have escaped me. Here's the screenshot:

Nice one, Cupertino.

My bookshelf

In chronological order:

The Hunting of the Snark	Lewis Carroll	1876
The Mythical Man Month	Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.	1975
Peopleware	Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister	1987
SPIN-Selling	Neil Rackham	1987
The Design of Everyday Things	Donald A. Norman	1988
Code Complete	Steve McConnell	1993
Data Mining	Ian H. Witten, Eibe Frank & Mark A. Hall	1999
Extreme Programming Explained	Kent Beck	2000
Why Not?	Barry Nalebuff & Ian Ayres	2003
Extreme Programming Explained 2nd Edition	Kent Beck & Cynthia Andres	2005
JavaScript: The Good Parts	Douglas Crockford	2008
The Art of Agile Programming	James Shore & Shane Warden	2008
Information is Beautiful	David McCandless	2009
ReWork	Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson	2010
R Cookbook	Paul Teetor	2011
The Lean Startup	Eric Ries	2011

All recommended. 

The bookcase itself is a 1960 design by Vitsoe. Also recommended.