I tried for months to convince people where I work to pair-program with me. I’ve had only very small success. Usually people object that it’s not efficient, since two people are doing one job. I disagree, particularly on the types of job we are doing, where you spend a lot of time stuck because you lack information that someone else has. This is not the kind of thing you can meaningfully argue about, though. You have to do a little pair programming to understand how amazingly effective it is. I’m sick of trying to persuade people to try it.

So I placed an ad on craigslist for someone to pair-program with me on private projects. I got about six responses, and started pairing with one of them. It’s been going well. We’ve been meeting two or three times a week for three hours at a time, and we’re about half way through a small web site that could potentially generate a small income stream.

Two people contacted me out of the blue, wanting me to make web sites for them. I and the pair programmer are both interested in doing these gigs. This looks like it’s turning into a business. We haven’t gotten any revenue yet, though. We’ll see, but this has been fun and exciting. Plus, I’ve been experiencing the joy of pair programming—blasting out remarkably simple, solid program code, cutting through problems like a hot knife through butter even when it’s stuff I know very little about.