Adi Bolboacă might be the person who has facilitated the most Coderetreats — he facilitated my participating in one remotely in 2017 — so it was a pleasant surprise, on the heels of Global Day of Coderetreat 2019, to see that a remote-pairing screencast we recorded a couple years ago turns out to have been decent enough to publish.

You might think Germany and Romania are near enough for a responsive screen-sharing session. Maybe so, but not over my in-laws’ internet connection. The published video was our second take. The first one was incredibly frustrating and totally unusable due to audio latency, so we took a deep breath and tried again. In this one, we have the opposite problem: we can converse normally but the shared screen can’t keep up. That was also frustrating (and I’d do just about anything to fix it before remote-pairing from there with anyone else), but at least we finally managed to get somewhere with the exercise. If you’re stuck dealing with poor network conditions, try showing a few minutes of this to your boss.

Despite our technical challenges, you’ll probably notice how skilled Adi is at remote pairing. I was disappointed that my Summer 2018 Coding Tour didn’t cause our paths to cross in person; still looking forward to when they will, perhaps for some non-remote pairing. For Adi’s experiences and insights helping others develop their skills, see his books Hosting and Facilitating Coderetreat and Facilitating Technical Events.