Remote Pair Programming

James Mead — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 09:48:22 +0000

A while ago, Chris mentioned that we’ve been trying out a few ideas for making remote pair-programming easier. We’ve been doing quite a bit more remote pairing recently. Most of the time we just use a combination of VNC (I’ve been using Vine Server) and voice over Skype (using a headset really helps).

But something else we’ve used successfully is multi-user GNU screen sessions. The advantage of this technique is that much less bandwidth is required and the terminal is much more responsive. I thought I’d post the magic incantation we’ve been using (on OSX), in case anyone else finds it useful…

  # on the server
  sudo chmod u+s /usr/bin/screen

  # first user connects to server over ssh and runs the following
  screen -S <session_name>
  ctrl-A :multiuser on
  ctrl-A :acladd <client_username>

  # second user connects to server over ssh and runs the following
  screen -x <server_username>/<session_name>

Mocha in Java using bytecode manipulation

James Mead — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 14:43:00 +0000

My former colleague and bytecode maestro Stacy Curl has an interesting article explaining how it would be possible to implement Mocha in Java using experience from his PicoUnit project.

It’s good to be reminded that meta-programming is possible in Java, but just a bit more effort.

Floehopper: Tag programming

Remote Pair Programming

Mocha in Java using bytecode manipulation