Tag: Software developer

The Moment

photo of a flying fish

The thread of communication between you and your pair is a long, tensile line attached to a sharp, silver fish slicing through cold water and swift currents.

“We are in the fetch method. This is where we are extracting the data object. Array. Sibling. Child. Child. Map…wait.”

Snap.

Your line is now slack, adrift in black water. It billows in empty ripples and all of your thoughts are gone. Where are you? Are you rightside up or upside down? In deep waters, the human brain loses all sense of orientation.

In pairing, this is the moment when you have drifted into silence as your brain plunges further and further inward. This is the moment when shadows creep into place along with voices telling you at varying levels of loudness to figure it out, just think harder. The unluckier of us will see a red face shouting about how we are not enough, we never were and who do we think we are anyway?

This is a moment of vulnerability. Our culture of tech hubris has given us plenty of go-to excuses for denying reality. You may say that the silence is because you are processing or that your brain cells are talking to each other, but that’s not really it. Really, what is happening is that you are too scared to open up to the person sitting next to you and you are hoping, hoping, hoping that the connection happens before anyone notices.

This is the moment pair programming is designed to turn around, replacing hubris, denial and fear with vulnerability, trust and communication.

This is EXACTLY when it is time to recognize where you are, to open up and to start talking even if you don’t know or even if you guess that what you are thinking is wrong.

I’m lost.

I don’t know.

It left me.

I don’t know what I’m doing.

Help.

Ok, what just happened?

These are words we don’t say enough. Often there is no reward for them. In fact, saying these words is often turned into an act of shame because they reveal an uncomfortable truth: we’re not perfect and we don’t know everything. We are not computers. We are human.

This is a moment of being human.

For pairing to function as it should, you must be able to tell the person next to you that you are lost without any fear that they will shame you or fear that you will be punished for not knowing something later.

The essence of pairing is that you are underwater together, you are thinking together and, most of all, you are vulnerable together. When the line of feedback between a pair snaps, it’s not one person adrift, it’s two, but one person doesn’t know it yet. The power of pairing is that two people will be able to rescue each other more often than not.

That person in the seat next to you might be as far as it is humanly possible to be from your idea of embodying crystalline elven magic, but they are your light in dark places when all other lights go out. You have to trust them to light the way and they have to trust you to send them a signal the moment you are aware that you are over your head.

A good pair will tell you that it’s ok and you will get back on track together.

Trust, vulnerability and communication in this moment is the bedrock of pairing. It is also the bedrock of building great software.

Thanks @rdy for teaching me about pairing.

Do the simplest thing first

red_kite_cropped

The road to redemption sometimes starts with a software mantra.

In test driven development, doing the simplest thing is a guide intended to keep you unblocked and moving:

  • When you are writing a new test…do the simplest thing first.
  • If you have something complicated to implement…do the simplest thing first.
  • If tests are broken…do the simplest thing first.

However, doing the simplest thing can still be a challenge and might not even look like it is immediately moving you forward. Often, the simplest thing is a hack that looks like a badly drawn picture or a step in the opposite direction.

It takes practice to rewire a bold and busy, future-driven, human brain for this type of thinking. The trick is in repeating and following the mantra. The challenge is in continuing to follow the path. Your steps and tests won’t be perfect every time and your brain won’t like the fact that you are discarding so many fancy plans, but this is the practice. You are walking a path and each next step is the smallest, simplest one you can take.

This path will wind itself further into your thinking slowly and steadily over time. Your brain will relax into the small steps. The architecture of your code will change. Your focus will sharpen until you see only the step in front of you.

Although this may look and feel like tunnel vision, you will eventually find yourself reaching for the simplest thing when you are faced with larger challenges either in software or in real life. It is this focus on taking a single simple step that will start to open some doors and help you break through limitations in your code and also within your own mind.

Often, when viewed from the outside, the simplest thing equates to something far beyond easy. It could be making a change that breaks all of your tests or it could be admitting that you were wrong about something or, even harder, wrong about someone. It’s here that doing the simplest thing means tearing down a wall you’ve built inside yourself. That’s not easy.

Although the software lesson is in the accumulation of small, simple tests that become a safety net for experimentation, the larger lesson has more to do with how we approach our own inner limits, choices and patterns. As humans, we have a tendency to remain stuck in our own lives, unable to see what is blocking us as we debug, console.log, and pry ourselves until we can’t pry anymore.

When we are in a state of discomfort, the simplest thing can appear to be a tiny kite hovering far above and out of reach, amidst the thick dark storm clouds we hang over ourselves. It might look far away, but it’s not. This is when the simplest thing turns into whatever it is that takes you one step away from frustration. This might mean walking away or it might mean doing something you feel certain is wrong or something that is scary but that will keep you moving.

In the end, that is what doing the simplest thing is all about: keeping you moving with smaller steps. This focus in a moment when you are wracked with self-doubt and frustration is not going to give you a test suite, but it will give you something far deeper: a sense of relief. With practice, relief eventually turns to confidence and you will see the clouds in your own mind begin to disperse.