Pairing Tour: Day 2

Today I had the opportunity to pair with Mike Jansen on some client work. He is currently working on a Rails app with some heavy client side Javascript via Backbone.js. We worked on a mix of bug fixes and new stories. Most of the bug fixes were in the Javascript code, while the new stories were in the Rails app, so I got to work on a variety of interesting stories. However, I didn't get to work on any Backbone code. In general, I'm a fan of client side Javascript frameworks and I like the way the our client is using Backbone in their app. I believe it has awarded them with a really rich UI. The Rails app I worked on today was nowhere near as large as the app that I worked on yesterday (1,500 specs vs 15,000 specs). This made a large difference in development feedback and turn around. We were able to fix a bug in the morning, push it to the CI server, and QA gave us feedback with in a few hours. Another plus was that we were able to run the entire test suite (acceptance + unit) locally. Even though this is better than having to wait 45 mins to get feedback from the CI server, it still took 5-10 minutes to run the suite. I think I'm starting to get a more clear picture of the dream world I have been living in the past few months of only Clojure development. The only thing limiting the feedback time on those projects was the JVM boot up time (~3 secs). At any rate, I'm grateful that I have been able to get a better understanding of what development will be like on client projects. Continuing my theme from yesterday about developer's personalized environment, I noticed that Mike has a very similar setup as Eric, besides that he uses MacVim, which is fortunately very easy for Textmate users like myself to pick up on. I'm starting to see that the Craftsmen at 8th Light really take ownership of their environments and customize them so that they can work as fast as they can. I'm hoping to take note of what other Craftsmen are using a start personalizing my environment a little more, albeit cautiously with version control. Tomorrow, I am off to pair with Steven Degutis on some more client work. Should be fun!