One of the great things about working for reinteractive is that we get about a day a week to work on community or open source work. It’s a chance for us to keep our programming skills sharp. One of the challenging things about working with a fully-remote team is that co-ordinating pairing is more difficult.
So, we, the developers, want to pair with you on your Ruby or Rails project!
How it Works
We come to your office on a Friday, sit with you or 1 or 2 of your developers and be a pair for up to 4 hours. This should comprise of 2 sessions of around 2 hours. Hopefully this means we can have lunch together (yay lunch!).
Since your project might be sensitive or tricky to setup we will be the observer and will hopefully prod you to get better at TDD, or provide a fresh perspective on some code that you’ve been wrestling with for a while.
Ideally, when we arrive you’ll have some idea of what we can pair on. Otherwise we can just spend some time refactoring your code, writing tests or implementing new features. We are happy to pair with anyone at any skill level.
The Details
Initially this will be with some of our developers who live in Sydney, so you should be somewhere easily accessible in Sydney. We can easily meet somewhere in the CBD if that’s more convenient. As it gets rolling we may also do this in the other places we have developers (all over Australia) so let us know below if you are in one of these areas and we’ll see what we can do.
This will only happen on Friday assuming we’ve fulfilled our client obligations during that week. This means it’s pretty much every Friday but sometimes we get sick or go on leave, want to take a break or the like :)
We would arrive at your office around 10:00am to 10:30am and we’d work for a couple of hours, break for lunch and then resume from around 1:30pm for another 2 hour session. Obviously we should be pairing on something Ruby or Rails related. And no, there is absolutely no charge for this.
What’s In It For Us?
As developers we want to pair with as many different people as possible. Since we normally work fully remote don’t get to pair as often as we’d like and think it’s a great way for both people to learn from each other.
Also from our point of view, taking a role in helping the community improve is a good thing, we also run our InstallFest for those people who are new to Ruby on Rails and DevelopmentHub for those people who want to hack on their Rails project amongst friends, pairing is a natural extension.
We get to blog about our experiences working with you and the rest of this amazing community. You’re under no obligation, but if we make a particularly good impression you’re welcome to hire reInteractive to work with you on a more regular basis.
Note
A couple of points here;
- firstly, places are REALLY limited. Not every Sydney developer will be doing pairing every week,
- secondly, as this is a free pairing process we are just giving free advice. It’s totally up to you to accept it or not,
- thirdly, it’s up to our developers to pick who they want to pair with, after all, they are giving up their open source training day to come and work with you,
- fourth, one pair day per dev… unless our devs love working with you :)
- finally, we can’t guarantee that everyone who wants to take advantage of this will be able to. We’ll try our best though!
Interested?
Please contact uswith who and where you are, what you’d like to work on and the like. We’ll then work out how to get you into the schedule.
