Pair programming with Sankalpa

One of my favorite ways to develop software is to do it together with others. Pair programming has always been a motivating and fun activity for me, but some pairings work better than others.

When our team was formed we decided to pair program and rotate partners every day. I had lots of fun programming with Milina, Asanka, Manoj and Chamath, but my favorite session was the one I had with Sankalpa. In this session, we achieved something that we would be helpless to do alone.

The task Sankalpa and I was working on was to include information from a calendar in Confluence in a date picker in a web application. As we sat down, I was dreading the integration part. Integration is often dreadful. More than anything, I wanted to hide from the problem. But with Sankalpa sitting next to me, I didn’t feel that I could give up, so I suggested we took a look at our Confluence calendar to get started. Sankalpa was at the keyboard and he found a “calendar feed” where I hadn’t thought of looking for it.

Looking at the feed, I exclaimed “Oh, I know this – this is vcalendar”. A quick Google later and we had found a library for parsing vCalendar in JavaScript. We quickly finished the code to adapt it to our desired format and moved to the date picker.

I was at the keyboard and I had used a date picker library called jQuery datePicker before. We quickly integrated it and I proudly refreshed the page to show the calendar events in the view! But it turned out that all the functionality that depended on picking a date was now broken.

I started grumbling about how I was much more comfortable with jQuery than with AngularJs. Unfazed, Sankalpa mentioned that Manoj had gotten the date picker to work with AngularJs in an earlier project. “Hey, Manoj, where did we use this date picker?”

Having much more experience with AngularJs than me, Sankalpa integrated the code into our code base and everything was working.

All in all, I had expected this to take 2-3 times as much effort. If we had been alone, we would probably wouldn’t have the courage to start with the integration right away. If he had been alone, Sankalpa probably wouldn’t had known how to parse the vCal feed. If I had been alone, I probably would have searched the Internet for hours to find out how to make AngularJs play well with jQuery date picker.

Together, we did what neither of us could have done alone. (At least not anywhere close to this quick)