One of the intriguing aspects of pair programming for me is that of the non driving person in the pair – what are they supposed to do?!

Obviously there are fairly well known strategies for more interactive pairing, such as Ping Pong and Ball and Board (which is where one person controls the mouse and the other the keyboard), but neither of these strategies suggest what to do when you are not driving

Obviously it is very easy to be a bad non driving part of the pair, by getting distracted by what’s going on around you and a quick fix that I’ve heard to solve this is that when you’re bored, ask for the keyboard back. This solves the immediate problem but still doesn’t make you any better at contributing when you’re not at the keyboard.

One idea that I’ve been playing with recently is keeping a list of the next task that needs to be done after the current one is done – effectively just tracking where we are on the story. We use tiny tasks for most stories as laid out by Patrick Kua. This does work although you still don’t feel that involved, and it can end up seeming like you’re dictating to the other person what to do. This is definitely an approach to be applied with some tact.

Some of the more skilled non drivers I’ve worked with have the ability to see the bit of code being worked on as part of the whole and are able to see when we have gone too far down the wrong path and should actually be making changes elsewhere. I find this a lot harder to consciously improve, and I’ve been told it’s a skill that comes with experience.

I’m sure there are other roles of non driving that can be applied, mentoring being one, although that’s for another post! Thoughts?

One of the more interesting concepts used on the NLP course that I did last year was the idea of only giving positive feedback to people.

The thinking behind the theory (which I think comes from Robert Dilts, one of the early thinkers behind NLP) is that people know what they are doing wrong and already beat themselves up about it; therefore there is no point you mentioning it as well.

I was initially sceptical about this approach as it seemed a bit too idealistic for my cynical mind. I found it extremely difficult to start with and didn’t give any feedback to anyone for quite a few sessions. Eventually though something clicked for me and by the end of the 18 day course I feel I did gain a greater respect for and recognition of the talents that other people on the course had. The need to focus only on the positive actually seems to drive the mind to see more in this area than it otherwise would.

Although noone likes it when they are criticised, I think there are some occasions when someone criticising you can prove to be extremely motivational. This basically involves them completely writing you off and you then being determined to prove them wrong. For example at school I was told that I would definitely fail the Pure Maths modules of my A Level Maths course. Completely unimpressed with this verdict I persevered with it for months eventually scoring 85%. Job done.

I think sometimes when giving critical feedback it can say more about you than it does about the person you are giving it to, and this is where it’s vital to step back and think why you are giving the feedback.

I find at least for myself the tendency is to want to point out things people do that annoy me, which in effect is me trying to make the person more like myself. Steve Pavlina suggests that the things we hate the most in other people are the things we actually hate in ourselves. Therefore his suggestion was if you find something someone else does annoying, first look at yourself and try and improve yourself in this area.

I’m not sure if I totally subscribe to why this approach would work but I definitely agree that it is way easier to change yourself than it is to change someone else.

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• Giving effective feedback

I am currently reading The Long Tail - very good book and even has a blog associated with it.

In one of the sections talking about how Amazon had changed the way books were sold, the author mentioned that Amazon actually have printing facilities available to them on site so that if they run out of copies of books they can just print some extra ones. I don’t know how I missed this but I had a look on Google and Amazon did in fact acquire an on demand printing company three years ago.

Sounds like a brilliant idea to cut down on wastage of unsold books although I imagine the overall printing cost per book would be higher if you excluded the cost of waste.

I’ve been told that InfoQ have a similar sort of idea going on whereby if you have a book you’d like to publish you can go to them and get it printed at a far cheaper cost than would be possible with a normal publisher. I couldn’t find anything on their website beyond the new ‘mini books’ series they have started running, but that does provide an email address to get more details so it could well be true. If so it’s great to see that it’s becoming easier for your average person to have their voice heard.

I’ve had the opportunity to have worked with many different people pair programming wise over the last year or so, and having seen it done in several different ways thought it would be interesting to work through some of my thoughts about this Extreme Programming (XP) originated practice.

First of all it seems to me that pair programming is a technique that is used with a lot more frequency at ThoughtWorks than at any other IT organisation.

Obviously I do not know every IT organisation in the world, but based on discussions at the ALT.NET UK conference I went to last weekend; it certainly came across to me like that. The difficulty in getting clients and/or management to see the value in having two people on one machine was the main factor mentioned as proving problematic.

I have been working for ThoughtWorks for 18 months now and have been pairing for all but 3 of those months. Perhaps contrary to popular opinion, not every project is a 100% pairing one.

I’ve paired with people for 20-30 days at a time, paired with people for 1 day at a time, paired with people who have been pairing for years, paired with people who are pairing for the first time, and all in all it’s been fun.

I now find writing code far more enjoyable when working with someone else, motivated by the opportunity to bounce ideas around and come up with better solutions.

The biggest benefit for me of pairing is that you have to vocalise your ideas to your pair. This massively reduces the chance of going down a dead alley as a ‘wrong’ idea would have to somehow make sense to two people, which is much less likely to happen.

Equally, when done well, you end up thinking a lot more about why you are doing things e.g. why should that method go on this class, should we introduce a new service, why are we testing it in this way, should we be testing it another way etc.

On the flip side there are times when you just want to look up something which interests you but isn’t totally relevant to the current task and that has to be placed on the backburner for the time being. Pairing can also prove very tedious when doing fairly trivial tasks such as changing configuration files; although of course it does help if every knows how to do this so pairing on these tasks does provide some benefit.

I will cover some of my other thoughts in future posts.

I’ve always been the type of person who only gets the motivation to do something if there is some useful practical reason for doing so. It therefore probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise that I hated the majority of my mostly theoretical computer science degree.

I was talking to one of my colleagues last week and came out of the conversation convinced that the desire to know the theory behind concepts is amplified when you actually get to see it in action in a real life system.

My prime example is multi threading and concurrency. At university we had to write a program to calculate e to 500 decimal places using multi threading. In my mind this exercise was completely pointless, and I don’t think I came out of it any wiser with regards to threading.

Contrast that to the project I’m working on now where the main window of our application was freezing up due to an expensive operation being run on the UI thread. The solution of course was to execute the expensive operation on a background thread.

Although I know this is a fairly trivial example, it did provide a real life situation where threading was required. As a result of this I have become much more interested in the specifics of threading and the potential problems that can arise when doing so.

It would probably actually prove more useful to see the concepts in action in a real life system before being taught the detailed theory behind how it all fits together. For me at least when I’m learning about something I like to have a reference point and having seen the concept in action would provide this.

It seems obvious to me therefore that studying for a degree after having first done a few years in industry would probably lead to you having a much richer learning experience and a much improved understanding. Not that I expect that to catch on!

I am or at least used to be the uber introvert.

To put this into perspective, at University I must have spent at least 80-90% of the time alone in my room while other people around me were out partying. The best example of this came during my first year when both of my friends from school (who were also at the same University) went home for the weekend on a Thursday afternoon. I went out of my room twice between then and Monday morning.

Contrast that to last night at 9pm. I was just sitting around waiting for Match of the Day which was due to start at 10.30pm. I couldn’t handle it anymore so picked up my coat and went up into London, watched my friend do a stand up set in Angel before heading south to meet some guys from work who were at a bar in Soho. I got home at 5am.

I’m not sure exactly where the crossover occurred or if indeed there has been a crossover so to speak, but things certainly seem different. I used to be the one who barely said anything in a group conversation but now people think there is something wrong if I don’t speak for 5 minute. Strange how things change.

Chief Executive of Merrill Lynch…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7064948.stm

Can’t get much worse than that really. It’s almost like the shareholders are saying ‘yes we think you’re rubbish and we’re putting our money where our mouth is’. Harsh times. Still I suppose someone has to take the bullet and I’m sure a huge payoff will be in the offing so maybe not too much sorrow for him.

I went to the first night of Wednesday Night Fever at Lee Harvey’s Backyard Club, courtesy of Hils Jago at Amused Moose where I will be starting a stand up course in a couple of weeks time.

There were 8 acts for the evening, and I stayed for 5 of them before realising that I was going to be left stranded in London for the night if I didn’t make a move for home.

Each of the acts was quite different in terms of style and delivery, although my favourite was a guy called Joe. He delivered a series of witty stories, keeping me on the edge of my seat anticipating what he was going to say next. His delivery was largely free of swearing as well which made it stand out from the other acts which featured swearing quite frequently. I believe swearing does have its place in comedy, but it’s much more skillful to deliver without resorting to that style of language. You certainly don’t see people swearing in Toastmasters speeches, although the audience is of course completely different so that must be taken into account as well.
The most immediate obvious difference was that the structure of the acts was much more fluid than for Toastmasters speeches - the various stories didn’t really seem to connect and often went off at a tangent. The delivery came across as being much more off the cuff than Toastmasters where you can tell that the speeches have been prepared in advance. Although I’m sure some parts of stand up routines have also been prepared, it was intriguing watching the delivery style and how it made it feel like they were making stuff up on the spot.

There was audience interaction yesterday which I have very rarely seen apart from by the most experienced Toastmasters. I think this probably made the stand up acts a bit more engaging as you felt part of it all whereas at Toastmasters the speeches are being delivered to you.

My feeling is that the best Toastmasters speeches are more polished and cleaner all round - there were still a few rough edges with the stand up acts and more hesitations than I had expected to witness.

There seemed to be more build up to certain sections in the stand up acts whereas Toastmasters speeches are straight to the point from the off from my experience.

One thing that was similar was that they both cater for their respective audiences and give them what to hear. Toastmasters speeches are by the very nature more serious in tone and are more business presentations than for entertainment. Perhaps this explains some of the differences noted above.

Of course I have seen many more Toastmasters speeches than stand up sets so I am looking forward to seeing how my opinions change as I see more of each.

I did my C7 in the Toastmasters CTM manual last night at Epsom Speakers Club, where I have been speaking since last January.

It was by far the best one that I have done so far, and one of the guests came to me afterwards and said that listening to me had inspired him to get involved in the topics session later on in the evening. He won the competition for best topic so I was really chuffed for him. A pretty impressive start to his Toastmasters career! Far superior to mine anyway.

The speech was all about comfort zones, which is where you stay in an area where you feel comfortable, where there is not much opportunity for you to learn, where everything comes fairly easily. It’s a nice place to be but in order to make positive changes in any area of your life it is necessary to leave this behind and step up to the plate so to speak. Now in general if you are at Toastmasters it is probably because you already believe this so perhaps I was speaking to the converted anyway!

Enough of the talking though, just what is Toastmasters?

For me it’s the opportunity to speak in front of a group of supportive people and be given advice by more experienced members on the areas that you could look to improve upon.

The evening is split into two distinctive parts:

The first half is focused on prepared speeches, and a pre determined group of speakers of varying experience will come up on the stage and speak about a topic they have chosen. Each of these speeches will then be evaluated, where the evaluator is looking to boost the confidence of the speaker by noting good areas of their speech while also covering areas for improvement and preferably giving examples of how these improvements can be made.

There is a break for 15 minutes or so before the second half gets underway - just like football!

The second half is all about off the cuff speaking. The format varies slightly depending on who is running the session but the idea is that you are given a topic to speak about, you get maybe 30 seconds to think about it, and then you come up on the stage and speak for up to 2 minutes. It’s certainly a challenge!

I was 4th on the stage last night which was strange as I had really got used to the idea of being one of the first to speak when it was my turn! What was not so good about the speech was that a) I ran over the time by about 40 seconds or so and b) It didn’t fit strictly to the objectives laid out.

These were both pointed out by my evaluator for the evening, as well as the fact that sometimes I seemed to move around the stage just for the sake of it.

The fact that I had felt so at ease on stage and had managed to make quite a number in the audience laugh without intending to meant that it was a fantastic experience for me. Just before I got on stage I realised that there was a table on the right hand side, and I decided to make use of it in one area of the speech. I was talking about being absolutely terrified at a party I went to in Vancouver a couple of years ago, and wishing the table had been there to save me! I actually hid behind the table while on stage - it went down pretty well.

Overall though my delivery was much more controlled, much slower than normal and was covered with pauses - an area of speaking that I have found particularly difficult in the past.

Finally, after 15 months of practice the stage feels comfortable! Somewhat ironic given the choice of topic, don’t you think?

An idea that I’ve been playing with for the last 3 weeks or so is that of sitting down at the end of each day and noting 6 positive things that have happened during the day.

Positive is self defined so it can be anything you want really…from a nice quiet walk on your own, to hanging out with your best mates, you choose.

I’ve generally found it quite easy to do because I try and put myself in positions where I am doing enjoyable things as often as possible, but it can be quite a challenge sometimes! For example last Saturday was a shocking day for me - I was around the house for most of the day not doing a great deal and then went to watch the United v Portsmouth match at my mates house. United lost so I was in something of a gutted state for the rest of the day and when it came to write down my 6 postive things for the day I was really struggling. I decided it wasn’t going to happen and went to sleep having only managed 2!

The next day I was determined to find something good about the day and not give up on this process because of one comparatively bad day…and I eventually came up with 6, although it was hard work!

For the record these were the 6 positives for last Saturday:

Obviously yours will be different to mine but I have been encouraging people to try this out and see what happens. I also used it in a Toastmasters warm up session.

From my experience it is very very easy to focus on the negative things, and therefore to end the day thinking of all the good things that have happened can be quite liberating.

Why 6 things?

Well it’s very easy to think of 3 things, 6 is double that and it can possibly help you find some things you enjoyed about your day that weren’t immediately obvious at the time.

That’s my experience anyway, but I encourage you to give it a try. What have you got to lose?!