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At my work, we are advocates of pair programming. From an organisational perspective, the practice has several advantages. We’re often more productive working with someone else – we keep each other on task and get stuck less often and for shorter periods of time. More importantly, the resulting code is generally better and more robust, in my experience, especially when combined with test- or behaviour-driven development.

Businesses often object to the practice based on cost. Why pay two programmers to do the work of one? But at the end of the day, you’ll have two developers intimately familiar with the code for future modifications and maintenance – i.e., the bulk of the software’s lifespan. Yes, you spend more in the short term, but for a better payoff in the future. You’re investing in the team, spreading the knowledge more widely.

It’s now been a few weeks since many of us in the U.K. have gone into lockdown. We’re spending a lot more time at home and our social calendar has suddenly freed up, completely, for the foreseeable future. So why are we so tired?

When we first moved to the U.K. in 1998 from the Boston, Massachusetts area, my very smart Aunt Kathleen gave my wife and I an abbreviated version of the course she gave to corporate managers who were about to go on overseas assignments. We found this training to be extremely helpful in the first few months in London. It was a guide for handling life-upturning change, precisely what we’re going through again right now, and is one of the reasons I was expecting the tiredness.

I took a few minutes last night to add a small feature to Emacs, saving me from some repetitive steps when I’m starting a blog post (like this one). It was a tiny bit of code and nothing exceptional in itself, but it reminded me of why I choose to use an editor that’s nearly as old as I am. It is designed for this kind of organic, incremental growth.

I often find it difficult to explain to my younger colleagues why you would use Emacs or Vim (another vintage editor) over modern tools such as VS Code or Intellij. The old editors are harder to learn. You can’t just sit down at one and be productive in minutes. It takes some effort, and usually at least a several weeks of it, to get the hang of them.

I’m trying to get one of the charities I work with on Zoom before our next scheduled meeting on Monday. This is at least the third time now that I’ve gone through the pain of getting a new group of people on the app, and it’s a very painful process. Every. Single. Time.

What kind of problems, you ask? Let me count the ways.

I can’t see (or hear) you..

Here’s a game to while away some of those long evenings in lockdown: Predict how the pandemic will change the world. What do you hope, or fear, will be different about our everyday life in a year or two?

It’s likely that very little will change. We’re pretty good at getting used to anything and carrying on as before. Eventually, a vaccine, wide-spread immunity or an effective treatment will relegate COVID-19 to just another hazard out there that might kill us, but probably won’t. The roads will fill with traffic again, commuters will pack the Tube and we’ll all just go back to business as usual. It’s hard to knock us off track, especially well-grooved ones.