Remote Pair Programming
I’ve been working with a increasingly large number of software interns lately. Most work with me hourly over a period of 3–6 months, then go on to get full-time industry jobs. Our work is 100% remote, generally via 1 hour long pair programming sessions.
Many of these interns come to me via my education resources (30+ cloud/data LinkedIn Learning Courses, 100+ original or forked GitHub Repositories or 215 YouTube recorded conference talks).
They often ask ‘will you mentor me?’ My answer is always NO.
Although I don’t mentor, I do work with interns. I wrote an article about the WHY of my interning process. Because I exclusively use remote pair programming with interns, I wanted to share what exactly we do for a broader remote working audience. To that end, the goal of this article is to detail HOW coding together remotely works for my teams.
What do you know?
Because my interns work on real-world all cloud projects from the first hour we work together, I ask that they have either already worked on something in cloud or (at minimum) have taken courses in working with the public cloud.
I don’t care which cloud potential interns learn (Azure, AWS, GCP), with my current workload, we’ll most likely be working with AWS or GCP. If they have had any experience actually building/deploying cloud applications (even hobby applications), that’s even better.
I also ask what the intern is studying (if a full-time student) or from what work background (doesn’t have to be tech), if the person is employed FT.
Additionally, so that they get a sense of what my idea of pair programming is like, I ask them to watch my course on LinkedIn Learning on the topic “Pair and Mob Programming”
Get the Tools
The first step in getting to the point of working together is to get the tools. Here’s what I use when remote pair programming:
- Screenshare — Google Hangouts (just need to get my intern’s email) or Skype (need to get my intern’s Skype username)
- Code Repo — I use a number of private and public GitHub Repos (need my intern’s GitHub username — and ask them to sign up for an account if they don’t have one). I also…
