Learning to code had been mostly fun, but there are also getting stuck and frustrated. When I told my friend who is a developer that I’m going to learn coding and getting stuck all the time, he bobbed his head and said “Yup, that’s learning to code for ya. I remembered my struggle to understand a loop within a loop.” and I thought to myself “What the hell is a loop within a loop?!” How I wish he had time and patient to teach this noob about looping.

That is why I appreciate DBC giving us the chance to do some pair programming, to learn together. All my pairing sessions went great for me. I’ve learned a lot, and most importantly, I’ve learned how to communicate my ideas. I’m had the chance to examine my understandings piece by piece when communicating with my pair, and he/she will always pick up details that I’ve missed. These are valuable details which they wouldn’t be found by me if I were to complete the challenge alone.

The feedbacks are also very helpful in my learning. All the feedbacks I’ve got help me to further prepare myself to be a better pairing partner. Some things I find from my feedbacks is that I need to improve my communications, switch up roles more often and take breaks in long sessions. I do noticed that I sometimes testing out code without telling my pair on what I’m testing and likes to be the driver most of the time. While I will usually take a break when I got stuck, I tend to be unwilling to do so in pairing sessions. This let to both my pair and I getting our mind clouded and losing focus. We were always be able to solve the problem quite easily after taking a small break.

Writing feedbacks are the hardest part of pairing for me. I’m having a hard time writing something that is actionable. It seems that I don’t always have good suggestions. I think it’s because I was focusing on the challenges and wasn’t very observant on how my pair is doing. It’s frustrating that I’m not contributing actionable feedbacks while receiving great feedbacks myself.