If your profession or passion involves writing code, this thought has entered your mind sometimes or the other as you shared the code you wrote with your colleagues or pushed the code onto Github as a public repository.
I have never participated in a pair programming exercise so far. From what I heard from a few people who have participated in pair programming exercises, the experience has not been good. After the activity, they felt that even though they got the solution right, the person on the other side judged them for how they went about writing the code. The code compiled well and worked but was not written the way the other person had expected it to be written.
“You did not use the right design pattern”, “did not abstract the code well enough”, “did not use an inbuilt function and went about duplicating an inbuilt method”.
Reviewing code well is challenging. Writing code well is challenging. But, we are all getting better at the craft the more time we spend at this.
“Code is Poetry” — WordPress coined this phrase and has it on its website. Code is indeed poetry. Some people are spending a lot of time getting better at writing poetry. Some write poetry to make a living and not because they feel as passionate about it.
