posted Thu 17 Jun 2010, 02:51 PM
A couple of weeks ago I transitioned a project I was working on to a pair in our office in Chile. When coming into a new project there is always that uphill battle of stuffing the domain into your head. You could read through the stories in Pivotal Tracker to learn the domain, and we do that. But the best way really is to just dive in and start pairing with someone who's already got the knowledge. In doing this you also pickup on the style and techniques that have become patterns in the project.
This process is natural and relatively easy when the person or pair you are transitioning to are located in the same building. But in this case the other pair was located in a completely different hemisphere. Thankfully they are currently in the same timezone so we were able to work together during normal office hours. How do you pair program though when when you are thousands of miles away? Well, thanks to Oliver Laumann and Carsten Bormann way back in 1987, we can achieve this modern miracle through the GNU Screen terminal multiplexer. The great thing about screen is when someone else is attached to …