Pair Programming

Hey all,

Tenseiga sent me a link to an interesting article: http://gamecareerguide.com/features/760/a_day_in_the_life_three_slices_of_.php?page=2. Unfortunately, i'm a programmer who doesn't really know much about the artists or designers daily work routine so i can't comment on those but i thought the programmer part of the article was very cool.

Apart from, what sounded like, the best lunch, i really liked the idea of sitting down and working in pairs. I've had experience in this style of working at my previous company. A colleague would come and ask for some help, sometimes he was just too tired to see the error but most of the time it took some time to solve. We used to work together on these issues and not only did we fix that particular error but we often found other areas of the code which could be changed to work more efficiently. Sometimes we'd argue about what was the right coding practice for a particular if statement. Another thing is that pair programming is a really good way of bursting ones ego, thus it is a good way of making my code into our code (again a big issue at my previous company).

I really think that this style of working should be used in more games companies, especially when it comes to teaching freshmen how to code for a living. When i joined my previous company, i was told to look into documents and once i had done that, start fixing bugs (I was put on a porting project, which in my opinion should be given to experienced/senior programmers). There were so many questions going through my head and since there were no senior or technical programmers at the company i just sat and tried to figure out what the other programmers did. What i soon found was that there was no methodological process to coding, there was no coding standards set by the company, no guidance at all and worst of all the internet was available through one laptop shared by the whole programming department.

Okay, so there were quite a few other problems at my last company but if i had been told to work with another programmer then the transition from student to employee would have been better, and maybe i'd still be working there.