Weeknotes for the week finishing Friday, 30 May 2025.

I updated my script for creating weeknotes. It now creates an article for a given date, rather than for today’s date, which means I’m less likely to run it on Friday and struggle to remember what I did that week (I’m writing this on Wednesday!). Expect longer, but not necessarily more interesting, weeknotes.

I read “On Pair Programming” by Birgitta Böckeler and Nina Siessegger. The article describes how to pair, the reasons why you should and shouldn’t pair, and concludes that you should pair judiciously. It isn’t a quick read — it’s over 9,000 words long — but it’s well-structured, with clear headings and sub-headings.

I wasn’t surprised by the article, but I’m keen on pairing. It demonstrates to people who are less-than keen on pairing that well-respected people who work for well-respected organisations have thought about the benefits and challenges of pairing, and conclude that pairing (mostly) works.

Lucy recommended the article in Slack; not to me specifically, but to the tech group in general. Pairing isn’t the “sensible default” in the tech group. I’m coming to the conclusion that it should be.

I’ve been reading the sed and grep manuals (GNU). I picked sed because I don’t often use it outside Neovim and even then in a very limited way (:%s/regexp/replacement/g). I was curious about what I was missing. I picked grep because I want to use it more, and more effectively: I’ve found it hard to learn on the job. Blub studies are important!