Pairing is tricky, you usually learn a lot, but not specifically about code. Sometimes you learn about code, sometimes you teach something and practice how to teach, and always can learn on how to better express yourself and treat people, it’s a rich experience. It’s not useful to just give/ask the answers to your pair, the important part is to make sure that both understand what is being done and agree with it, mainly on the details, even indentation and variable naming, keyboard shortcuts, and many other things, that’s how to get the best of it.
Today we had to implement a Sudoku solver, which was really challenging. Our approach was to solve it by ourselves and take notes on how were we solving it in order to transform it into an algorithm. Use your brain to discover how to solve a problem, and then teach the computer how to solve it. Your brain is awesome at problem solving and computers are dumb, but they are freaking fast dumbs.
So we basically finished the first part of the Sudoku solver, which solves puzzles iteratively, it works when there’s no need to make guesses, otherwise it enters an infinite loop. Which leads us to the second part, that is guessing, recursion! yay! Still have to refactor the code of the first part though.
Hope I find some time to finish it by the weekend.
Random:
Your brain works so much better when you’re not either tired or hungry. I remember my professor of the Machine Learning class I took in Brazil before coming to DBC. And even though I thought I knew it, I just started to notice and actually doing something about it, a couple of months ago after listening to it. Which reminds me of a presentation, I can’t remember the name of the speaker, but he’s the author of the book Brain at Work, saying that simply understanding how your brain works and noticing what’s happening at the moment, already gives you more control over it.
Here at DBC, it holds completely true. Get your rest and remember to eat.