Pairing and Giving Feedback

Paired Programming

To be completely honest, in the beginning I wasn't a very big fan of pairing. I'm very much a type-A personality who likes to get things done a certain way. But when I started to learn how to program, I realized I was way over my head. I had to start thinking in ways I've never been asked to think before. Pairing became a way for me to vocalize and explain my thought process, as well as learn how other people are thinking. This became especially helpful when we started to tackle some of the more difficult ruby challenges that involve a lot more logic and pseudocoding than anything else. Pairing continues to give me a chance to view problems from different perspectives, and learn different methods of logic. As the saying goes, two heads are better than one! Especially when it comes to a field like computer programming where there really is no one right answer. I now find pairing to be much more enjoyable and rewarding than I initially did.

Giving and Receiving Feedback

DBC is pretty adamant about their feedback policy - at least seven pieces of actionable, kind, and specific feedback per unit. I've always been a strong receiver of feedback as I see it as a way to grow and improve myself. For the most part I have had some really awesome pairing sessions, so I don't know if the feedback that I've been giving/receiving has been the most useful. I find that constructive feedback (actionable) is much more useful than "nice" feedback. From the feedback I've received, I think in the future I can take a bit more time at the beginning of sessions and end of sessions to check in/out with my pair. I think pairing is awesome and using socrates to give and receive anonymous feedback is a great idea, but sometimes after a great pairing session I have nothing actionable to say to the other person because I am/was so content with how everything went. Pairing and using the feedback from pairing is a very efficient way to check-in on progress of learning a new concept, and it's very grounding. I appreciate what we are doing at DBC and how we're going about doing it.