The last pair programming assignment in CSE 142 was hellishly hard. It was the culmination of a three-week traffic-simulation project which got more and more complicated at every step. This week's assignment involved cars following directions to get to a destination and making turns, as well as obeying traffic lights and not running into other cars. It was a pretty stupid simulation, but the code was more complicated than you might think, just to look at it.
The assignment was so hard because it was meant to be a two-person project. However, my job was made somewhat harder by the fact that I had a ditzy partner. Now, to be fair, I'm a fairly independent worker and often find it difficult to adjust to working with someone else. Programming, especially, is a fundamentally solitary pursuit for me. I can be a good partner, but I have to concentrate on teamwork, and it's next to impossible if I feel like my partner's not really contributing anything.
That's how I felt this week. My partner and I met up on Wednesday afternoon, the first time our schedules matched up. When he found me in the lab, I had already read the assignment the night before and highlighted the important bits in yellow, and I was fiddling with some of the more elementary bits of the project. My partner said he hadn't read the assignment yet, fiddled in his bag to find it, and asked if he could read mine since he'd lost his. (I don't think he ever made it all the way through reading the assignment—always the first step!) That was just the beginning...
Enough griping about useless partners. We spent two hours coding on Wednesday, two hours on Friday morning, and another two hours Friday afternoon. Half of that time was coding, and half of it was debugging. By the end, we could hardly believe that we'd actually finished it!
Well, imagine my surprise when I finally ran the simulation for Jeff on Sunday evening, and none of the cars were turning or going to their destinations! So I fiddled with things and only managed to break things completely. Eventually I asked Jeff for help, and he fiddled and tested while I read for a while and cooled my head. After a while I took it back from him, and we fixed a couple of small but Very Important coding oversights (specifically, variables being set to the right values and at the right time).
Oh, and one further note on my partner. Last week I wrote this post and then this comment. Dunno why I automatically assumed my partner was female.
Update 15.8.2003: I got a perfect score on the code and on the write-up (3 points off the written assignment
questions, which hardly count).
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