so this looks like an interesting read.....http://www.aosabook.org/en/index.html

cool things to play with sometime

http://wiki.processing.org/w/Android

and obviously
http://openkinect.org/wiki/Main_Page

Pair IT

So I had read an interesting article (http://pragprog.com/magazines/2011-06/pair-programming-in-a-flash) over the weekend about pair programming. I have done a bit of pair work with Ron, but not terribly much. It seems like a potentially great idea, especially if you can mix junior and senior level guys together, there is a great deal of learning that can happen, and it is a great way to mentor.

The interesting thing however that I thought of today is that most of my pair work is not while coding but with deploying servers. Over the last few months I have been more involved in helping set up webapp servers in conjunction with our IT department. The observation I had is that we are essentially doing paired IT, in much the same way that the pragmatic guys are saying to do paired programming. My observation is that paired IT for deploying webapps is a very good way to do things. Things move very quickly using this technique, and there is very little down time working with new services that have to be deployed. I think one of the keys here is also the combination of people involved. IT is obviously IT, with little programming experience, but a wealth of background in managing servers and networks. Then I am a programmer with a decent background in server technology. That combination I think leads to an effective pairing, where the task can be approached by two people with differing views. The other advantage I notice is that when things go wrong it is in many cases a much shorter troubleshooting period, since having a developer right there means that looking at stack traces is more fruitful in many cases than it is with only IT personnel looking at it, or having to send it to a developer. Obviously this still happens since I am often not the developer for the project being deployed, however I think having that combination of skills is a great way to pair in IT.

So, here are some guidelines I think might be useful:
- Deploy new services/webapps in a pair
- One member of the pair should be from IT and the other from webops or development
- experiment with ideas singly, not in pairs

So, I think this is just as good of an idea as pair programming, and can really make deployments fairly painless and quick.