Get to know your editor
As programmers we spend most of our time (apart from meetings :p) editing text. I’m a very avid user of emacs. I’ve been using the editor since 2007 after a friend took the time to explain it to me. I had tried to use it at university but couldn’t understand how to use it, I tried also vim and it was even worse, so I ended up using something a bit friendlier like gedit back then. Anyway, this is not about which editor is better or worse but about sticking to something.
Pair programming Dos and Don'ts
There are several things that will make your pair programming sessions work better. Things you can actively do and others best to avoid.
First of all, you need to give it an honest shot, especially if you’re not experienced in pairing. Pair programming is a skill and needs to be learned. Like learning any other thing the process can be tough, it can take you out of your comfort zone and get your mind resisting and wanting to do things as usual. So it’s important to be open about the experience and try to make the best of it.
Using magit with Github Enterprise
I’m a big fan of magit and I’ve been using it for many years and I found some time ago the magithub extension, which is great and allows you to integrate with github, see your pull requests, open the browser for the current project, create PRs, etc.
Pair programming revisited
I’ve always liked pair programming, since my college times. I remember doing coding exercises spending late nights at the computer lab and we were always working with your partners. And you would talk to everyone in the room trying to figure out how to solve things, you’d sit with people from other teams and share code. I didn’t know you’d call this pairing then.
Switch AWS accounts easily using roly
Many companies keep their AWS accounts separated per environment, per team, etc and you can find yourself in a situation where you have users and credentials on many different accounts. From a security perspective this is not ideal as managing this can be very hard, people will change teams, leave the company, etc and cleaning up their access on all accounts can be very tedious and time consuming.