Today was the second day of my pairing tour. Today James and I were pairing remotely. I was in the office and although VSCode (the IDE James uses on his linux) does not have a plugin for cloud collaboration, and I wasn’t able to drive; I was able to watch James work through the problem for the day and he kept me engaged throughout the process.

The issue we worked through was getting an in-app wizard that displayed a list to:

  1. Stop highlighting all the items in the list, and only highlight an item when/if it were individually selected.
  2. Upon item selection, activate a next button that when clicked proceeded to the next step in the wizard.
  3. Pass the value of an item selection to the next step in the wizard.

It was a great learning experience to see how James moves through this client’s code base. I felt like I absorbed some of his powers by watching his screencast on my monitor… Having the appear.in window maximized in effect gave the illusury sensation that I was coding. At least some of the time that was the case, but all of the time, it was like I was watching a kata… Only it was 6 hours long and the problems to solve could not have been managed through muscle memory. Still though the speed at which James worked was comparable to many of the katas I’ve seen or watched online, speaking to his comfort in the code base, experience as a craftsman, and self-confidence in his choices.

This is more evidence to me that there are attainable but far away levels of mastery that I have yet in store.