Preface

When I started programming, I had no idea how important teamwork is, as I only learned about programming languages, mathematics, and tools during my studies. It didn't take me long to understand that you need to learn from your colleagues in order to make the profession of programming a nice experience. After a while, I started learning about more and more things, and mentorship began to help me a lot. Having someone, or multiple people, from whom to learn intensively really boosted my career, and I think I burned some steps faster than others, just because of mentorship.

Pair programming was one of the activities I was doing with my mentors, either face to face, or remotely, even in times gone by when the internet wasn't that good. I started intensively using pair programming during the Coderetreat events I was facilitating, a full-day learning experience organized by volunteers for passionate coders. Since I was traveling all over Europe with Coderetreat for a good few years, I started to get to know people all over the place, and I wanted to learn more from them. So remote pair programming was the natural approach.

Remote pair programming is now my main learning tool, besides reading articles and books, and having discussions with people who are smarter than me. Working together, trying, and struggling together on a problem is challenging but also fun and rewarding. I hope that after you have read this book, you will find that remote pair programming can and should be challenging but also fun and rewarding.