The idea of “pair programming” where two people work on the same task, sometimes swapping roles at various points throughout the work, might seem like a very inefficient way to create software products - I mean - you can’t dig a hole faster or bigger or a better hole (whatever that may be!) with only one person holding the shovel and the other commenting on proceedings.

That thinking misses a crucial aspect of software development and it can be a difficult mindset to break out from, especially when you may have strong software development skills but come from a solo development environment. Software engineering is as much about communication as the mechanical process of writing code - which is clearly vitally important - but it’s also clear that the latest advances in AI are making that aspect of development less a purely “human” skill.

What AI isn’t taking away from software engineering is the design process - the deep thinking about a specific problem which probably doesn’t have a single correct solution, but involves competing priorities, changing requirements and creative leaps of innovation.

That’s where pair programming pays dividends on many levels. Software engineers collaborate, bounce ideas around, test each other and help keep each other moving towards the goal.

At Ultamation, the end results speak for themselves - Dan and Kieran have worked (and played pool) together over one of our recent integration products. They’ve thrashed out ideas, written clean code carried out pre-emptive code-reviews; all of which makes the downstream review, testing and deployment process more efficient, not less.

The outcome is an incredible product spanning Crestron Home device drivers, cloud services, 3rd party OAuth2 authentication, subscription licencing and more - and it was only last year that Kieran graduated from the University of Liverpool (Dan is also a Computer Science Alumni).

I don’t know if Elon has Crestron at Home but, if he does, we’ve got him (and you) covered for his cars and power monitoring. Elon, if you’re listening, we’d be delighted to extend the product to provide SpaceX telemetry on your Crestron Home panels too

(* Two’s complement is a computer science approach to representing signed integers)

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