So much of the work I do as a programmer does not go into the repository.
Yeah, that's not ideal, but so much of the work I do is in the technique. In the keyboard shortcut, the ~/.bashrc, the discipline of red-green-refactor, of pomodoro.
None of that stuff goes into the pull request, and yet all of it is something my programming pair can experience and learn from. And when I enter an area that's bizarre to me — when I am picking up a new language, a new tool or paradigm — a partner is 1000x more productive than my incessant slacking of code snippets when her explanations easily become demonstrations, and not least of all because it means that helping me is not an interruption to your KPIs.
None of that comes across in a pull request.
Maybe if your work exists entirely within code, within languages that you know, with build toolchains that are done changing, and you're entirely satisfied with your development environment, habits, and methods. In that case, yeah, CI and a little PR review are probably all you need.
Meanwhile, pair programming actually decreases the discipline you need to be a good engineer.
I agrer that these things have value too but some places do Developer Share Sessions where one developer does a short presentation on a complicated subsystem or tools they use or a new api that needs integrated.
That sounds terribly dull. Unlike during a programming exercise, there's no forcing function during a presentation that impels me to try and put this information in the right place in my mind. Certain note-taking strategies attempt to fabricate such a forcing function, but it's ersatz.
Most of my notes during presentations or long-winded meetings boil down to "what motivated this presenter to speak?" or "why do I have to sit through this?"
So much of the work I do as a programmer does not go into the repository.
Yeah, that's not ideal, but so much of the work I do is in the technique. In the keyboard shortcut, the ~/.bashrc, the discipline of red-green-refactor, of pomodoro.
None of that stuff goes into the pull request, and yet all of it is something my programming pair can experience and learn from. And when I enter an area that's bizarre to me — when I am picking up a new language, a new tool or paradigm — a partner is 1000x more productive than my incessant slacking of code snippets when her explanations easily become demonstrations, and not least of all because it means that helping me is not an interruption to your KPIs.
None of that comes across in a pull request.
Maybe if your work exists entirely within code, within languages that you know, with build toolchains that are done changing, and you're entirely satisfied with your development environment, habits, and methods. In that case, yeah, CI and a little PR review are probably all you need.
Meanwhile, pair programming actually decreases the discipline you need to be a good engineer.