Virtual Collaboration: Tips and Tricks for Working Together at a Distance

Virtual Collaboration: Tips and Tricks for Working Together at a Distance

Sarah Simpkin (University of Ottawa) Sam Popowich (University of Alberta)

What is pair programming?

Flavours of Pair Programming

• Face to face: agile technique (professional). Two developers on one machine.
• Virtual: adopted by non-professional coders, primarily for mentoring (cf. Avdi Grimm's Pair with Me)

Why did we want to try it?

Setup

• Canarie (www.canarie.ca) server
• ...hosted by Cybera (www.cybera.ca)
• Ansible playbook to install OS, basic packaging.
• SSH keys
• tmux
• Google Hangout
• ... for face-to-face chat and screen sharing
• Slack

What did we use it for?

• Testing
• Refactoring
• Unix/infrastructure work
• Git/GitHub practice

Linked Folk

• + Kim Pham, UT-Scarborough
• Folk music version of Linked Jazz project
• Practical way to start getting familiar with linked data concepts, tools, and processes

Ways to learn from each other

• Pair programming
• Hackfests
• Code reading groups
• Birds of a Feather
• Reading docs/forums

Code reading groups

• Regular practice
• One hour, once a week
• ~100 lines
• Can focus on one language, or many
• Library-related scripts, or others
• Weekly "tour guide" leads session
• See Coral's talk at Code4Lib 2015

Birds of a Feather

• Developers and Sysadmins at University of Alberta Libraries
• Discuss problems, practices, workflows
• Read code, analyze, kick ideas around

Things we learned

• Scheduling was tricky, easy to put on backburner
• Helpful to see how others work
• Friendly, supportive environment
• Community is key. Thank you, community!

Thanks

@sarahsimpkin

@redlibrarian