Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Boys Behaving Badly

Yet another young NASCAR driver gets himself busted doing something he shouldn't. This time, the driver is Martin Truex Jr., and his offense is public urination. Specifically, he was busted peeing on the side of his car in a parking garage. A little gross, but not really much of a news story. After all, what guy hasn't peed on something that he shouldn't have. His car, his neighbor's house, whatever happens to be four stories down from the window of his dorm room, whatever.

On the other hand, his excuse is just pitiful.
"We had a few drinks, I was not intoxicated and we had a designated driver," Truex said.
Really? Not intoxicated? You exhibit this sort of behavior while relatively sober? To me, that actually sounds worse than admitting that maybe, just maybe your judgment was diminished by having a touch too much to drink...

1 comment:

stuffle said...

The technique described there is more appropriately called "pair programming", and is often employed when using XP as a development methodology.

I have never been in a work situation that used XP, or any of the other "agile development" philosophies. These development philosophies work well when requirements are changing often throughout the life of the project. In the industry I work in now, that is often the case, and adopting a more agile approach would be a good thing. We are working on it internally, though I doubt any approach we settle on will be quite as extreme as XP.

Back to "pair programming", however. In my experience, variations on pair programming work very well. Code cannot be effectively created in a vacuum, and working on the code in pairs like that allows for there to be a couple of different people intimately familiar with the same chunk of code, allowing them to bounce around ideas, etc, and pull out the best ideas, best practices, etc. All in all, this tends to reduce costs later on in the development cycle, resulting in a net gain in productivity.

I don't buy into it for every project, but for projects where there is a high degree of either complexity or volatility, or both, I think it is a good technique to employ.