Pairing in node with a Healthy Hacker

I had the opportunity yesterday afternoon to pair with Chris Hunt, host of the new podcast Healthy Hacker. After listening to the "Growing as a Programmer" he made an interesting announcement that I have not yet heard anyone else do at his caliber of programming. He was offering free time to pair with him in 30min increments. I signed up rathe quickly after noticing a number of open spots.

At the time of signing up you have to put in a subject to pair on for the session; With me being really ambitious I chose a subject I had zero experience in, node.js's socket_io plugin. I planned on messing around with it prior, in hopes to add live chat to my Ruby Newbies page, but it didn't happen. I got extremely side tracked with learning Ember and updating my Chuych app.

My overall impression of pairing with an absolute stranger on a subject I had no knowledge on, was great. Not only did we finish the socket_io tutorial, we also got it pushed to heroku and tested it out live. I did the driving in the pairing, while Chris navigated through the documentation, which was extremely valuable in me learning. We did get hung up on pushing a node/express.js project to heroku, since both our experience were in Rails, but he was able to pin point in the docs how to update the server to the heroku environment variable.

I am actually pretty stoked to continue to work on this project on my own and implement it with the RubyNewbies things. Node is a new frontier for me and I hope to continue exploring the various plugins and frameworks associated with it. To view our code check it out here.

If you are interested in pairing with Chris, checkout his calendar and sign up soon, but there seem to be very limited spots available.