Pair Programming

There is nothing like pair programming with someone else till 1 a.m. in the morning!  Magical things seem to happen when you are up that late trying to learn more about coding :-)


It's so much better to be hired and be able to practice coding than to simply be reading about it and studying on your own time.  For example, when I took an online Rails SASS Berkeley course on EDx, the course talked about Agile methodologies, User stories,  3 week coding sprints, and software life cycles.

I passed the course, got my grade and felt good.  The truth is I didn't know anything about Agile or how it worked.  When interviewed I mumbled something I had heard in class about weekly Scrum meetings being important.  I still don't know much about Agile and don't pretend to.  However as ZipList ( the company I work for ) ZipList just launched the new website yesterday, a project that just started when I was hired on in August.  I find all of the Agile terms meaning so much more to me and not just something to say in an interview.


I am loving learning, loving this whole coding thing!  I still have a LOT to be desired in my skills and abilities, which brings me to pair programming.  Every Wednesday evening from 7:30p.m. till usually 1a.m.  I pair program with my brother Cody.  I love that after every coding session we both walk away just a little bit better in some way.  There is nothing that will help you learn faster than pair programming with others at least once a week.

I am fairly good at Haml and Scss, and Git.  My brother is a coding logic savant.  He eats tough coding challenges and laughs whenever I get stuck :-)  In fact after I showed him Project Euler he went home the next day and decided to easily complete problem 168 without much difficulty.


I help him with his front end knowledge and he helps me with coding logic, a perfect match.  Find someone to study with.  You will have a lot of fun, help each other, and grow your coding knowledge like you are on steroids!


In other news I am re-doing my entire book "No Degree, No Problem".  It needed A LOT if editing and grammatical cleaning up.  I am also adding several more chapters that I think will help people learn how to code and get hired much faster.  Hopefully next month the book will be done and re-released :-)


Keep coding peeps, it gets addictive after a while  =-)