For the past 3 months, I've been consistently pair-programming with my CTO.

Here's how it started, the progress, and what I've learnt along the way.

🧵

I'd always been vaguely interested in pairing, but it wasn't something we really did in my first job.

My interest was piqued by this (oh so timely!) tweet from James, a week before I started my new

In my onboarding, I mentioned this to my CTO and he was open to giving it a go.

We decided to incorporate it into our workflow and agreed to slack each other whenever we wanted to pair.

However, this did not go to plan.

3/13

Neither of us were in the habit of pairing and honestly, I had so much imposter syndrome around being hired that I was hesitant to ask because I didn't want to reveal how "terrible" I was.

(I moved from a largely HTML/CSS role to a full-blown React/Redux environment.)

4/13

Two weeks went by with little pairing.

In my week three one-to-one, I finally mentioned my struggles with the massive codebase & the panic I was feeling.

My CTO immediately came up with a game-plan, and we formally scheduled two weekly pairing sessions henceforth.

5/13