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Pairing is intimidating, hard, and exhausting for most people when they start. It provides countless benefits, but it can be daunting for even seasoned developers. Braintree has a culture and significant tooling around improving the pairing experience, but my experience as a cop gave me the skills needed to thrive at pairing. This talk will briefly cover the tooling of how we pair at Braintree and talk about how my experience as a cop taught me to pair. Help us caption & translate this video! http://amara.org/v/HKqf/
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In the talk titled "Policing and Pairing: An Unlikely Preparation," Dan Quan reflects on how his experience as a police officer has influenced his approach to pair programming as a developer at Braintree. He emphasizes that pairing can be intimidating but offers significant advantages, such as improving new developers' ramp-up time and enhancing problem-solving capabilities. Key points include: - **Pair Programming Practice:** At Braintree, pair programming is standard, involving two developers using a single machine. The practice encourages collaboration and communication, which are also critical skills evaluated during the hiring process. - **Tools and Techniques:** The company utilizes various tools to manage the pairing process effectively, including VMs, Vim, and Tmux. The transition to virtual environments has facilitated easier collaboration, despite challenges for newcomers in adapting to these tools. - **Learning from Policing:** Dan compares the training of police officers with onboarding developers, suggesting that the focus should be on showing and allowing mistakes in both fields. He shares insights from his police training experiences that influenced his training approach to new developers. - **Communication in Pairing:** Dan discusses the importance of dividing responsibilities during pair programming and maintaining open lines of communication, drawing parallels to his experiences as a cop where team coordination was vital during high-pressure situations. - **Overcoming Tunnel Vision:** He warns against tunnel vision in both policing and programming, advocating for the benefits of pairing to maintain awareness and avoid critical oversights. - **Community and Trust:** The sense of community and open feedback is highlighted as a major difference between his past and current roles, emphasizing the importance of trust and collaboration in achieving quality outcomes in coding. Dan concludes by encouraging developers to leverage pairing as a means to ensure code quality, emphasizing that collaboration not only boosts performance but also fosters a healthy team environment. His unique perspective provides valuable insights into how the principles of pairing can be applied by drawing on experiences from policing, ultimately enhancing the work culture at Braintree.
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