Remote pairing is something I have never done before. We also never had to work from home, though. I paired with my teammates that are working on InternBit. I feel like it would be cool to pair with people from other projects in RadGrad because it would be cool to see what the others have been working on. For the remote pairing, we mostly used CodeTogether as our basis to share our code so we could view and edit on the same files. The other option was FlooBits. The purpose of this remote pairing program was to get to know our teammates as well as produce an engineering program that summarizes our best practices. It is important that we develop the ability to work synchronously, and it will be more difficult considering we can’t have face-to-face interaction at this time during the pandemic. This remote pairing program should help us become more comfortable coding and working with others.
My first session was with Kelli. She is within our InternBit developer group. CodeTogether is what I used to enable my partner to view and edit my files in IntelliJ. Together, we worked on exploring the Javascript libraries called Tatooine and Simple Crawler. We spent about an hour and a half coding together. We wanted to experiment with a different type of scraper tool than what we were already using. Simple Crawler was a bit confusing because of all the different components that it had available. We were trying to use the examples to run in order to get an idea of what it is supposed to do. We ended up switching to Tatooine since it was more of a scraper than a crawler. Tatooine was the total opposite because the npm package page had so little information. I found a GitHub page for Tatooine so we tried to input one of the examples to see what it did. We had to play around with the code for a while but we ran out of time before we could figure it out. But Jenny and I sort of fixed the code when we did our pairing program.
Jenny was my second session so we knew how to use CodeTogether already. We both were working on the Javascript Library X-ray prior to this pairing session. We spent a solid hour coding together. She shared her code and we went over it together. She was showing me Phantom, and the problems she was having with it. It was still hard because I didn’t know of phantom until she brought it up, so I couldn’t help as much. I guess this is when meeting in person would actually be beneficial. We went over the types of websites we were scraping and what information we were able to get off of it. We then switched to my code for my website I was scraping. Since we both knew X-ray, we decided to carry on the Tatooine scraper that Kelli and I had not solved. Jenny helped me with my error I was trying to figure out this whole week. Then we played around with the code from the GitHub page to make it scrape the CoolWorks website. We kept coming at a dead end when it came to scraping the actual items we needed. I think it was still successful because we got the command to log the main sections.
Last but not least, I paired with Mirabela. We basically went over all of our code and what our methods did. I sent her my CodeTogether link and she sent her FlooBits link. She was using Cheerio as her library and I was doing X-ray. When I saw her code, it was very different than X-ray, which was cool to see variety in scraping methods. I learned how she got the scraper to keep going on the next page link through the pagination. She also sent me links to help me with learning how to use CSS Selectors as well as learning how to not appear like a bot while scraping. After, I showed her my code and explained how X-ray worked and what I scraped off of the website. She also helped me with the pagination part of going through all of the pages. We spent about 30 minutes going over everything.
Overall, I think that this was a great experience because it is hard to help a teammate with coding errors without seeing the actual code. I also think that working on something together builds teamwork skills as well as communication. With nothing to do outside of the house, it tends to be harder to start something when you are in a lazier mode than you would normally be. That is why this remote pairing helps with being productive as well since you have a partner to work with and a set time. I learned a lot more working with my peers than I would have by myself. I saw things I could incorporate into my own code and also learned new libraries with my teammates. I also enjoyed breaking the ice barrier with them as well. This was a great experience and I hope we can continue to do this since it is the next best substitute for face-to-face interaction. I also have no recommendations for how to perform this programming successfully because I think it went swimmingly well for a test run.