Like any story like this, you needed to be there to get the context. One of the downsides of pair programming is that it's great when you both have complimenta

Like any story like this, you needed to be there to get the context. One of the downsides of pair programming is that it's great when you both have complimentary skillsets. It's less productive when no one knows what the heck is going on. In this case, the task was to benchmark how many writes one could make to Kafka using our monolith. They wanted to see at least 10K/writes per second. The only problem was no one knew how to use Kafka (well), including the person who was asking for it. So I wrote some gnarly looking Bash code to fire up Kafka, Zookeeper, the app, etc. Some people wanted to use Docker, but I didn't see the value in using a slower VM w/ limited resources. I wanted to use as much CPU as possible. My pair didn't know Docker, Bash, or Kafka. I lost my pair somewhere around talking about having to clean up zombie processes. It went downhill from there.