I am a #laptop person. Every couple of years I try to get a desktop machine, but it never feels right. Same with attaching monitors to the laptop. Too much hassle, and too much switching back and forth when moving around. With a good MacBook, everything is always right there and always works.

But I set up an external monitor for #PairProgramming now, so that I can watch the shared screen and also look at other windows. And it helps a lot with #Slack, too, whose window management is very clumsy.

A pleasant side-effect of #PairProgramming is that it automatically improves the quality of code review and the need to wait for merge request approvals.

Since every line of code in the merge request is the result of negotiation and discussion between two developers, the four-eyes-principle is already satisfied and the merge request can be approved directly.

Without, it would either be rubber-stamped not to cause delays or require quite a lot of time on the reviewer to dive into the details.

As a side-effect of this, I got to experience "AI" coding assistants.

I am staying away from that tech because it is a net-negative societally, environmentally, legally, ethically and all-around, but my coworker is using it (with encouragement from management who are in love with the idea).

So #Copilot pops up in our #PairProgramming sessions.

I have to admit the code and commit message suggestions it makes are surprisingly good. It helps. If you ignore the big picture, it would be tempting.

On the tooling side, we are not using any special #PairProgramming software yet, and I have a hunch that we won't.

You can get very far with very little friction with just screen sharing over a #Slack huddle. We can talk to each-other, both see what the "driver" is seeing, we cannot type into the editor at the same time, but the "watcher" can draw on the screen.