A tale of two programmers
Steve and Chris were as unalike as I've ever seen. Steve would toss out reams of code, sometimes creating the skeleton of a game in a few manic nights of coding and then he'd run out of steam to become slow as molasses. At roughly this point in time, Chris would enter the picture. He'd take the pile of work that Steve had done, and bit by bit, he'd clean it up and make it reliable and efficient. They knew each other so well that they didn't actually discuss the code much, it just got passed back and forth in this fashion until the job was done, usually in record time.
Their secret was obviously their complimentary characters and the fact that they'd grown up together, and had gotten to rely on the other guy 'having your back', as opposed to spending endless hours on transferring the knowledge Chris had been through this so many times that he knew quite well what to expect.
Today we'd probably call this 'pair programming', but it was pair programming in a way that was far more than the sum of its parts. Chris wouldn't be able to come up with an original work if his life depended on it. Steve would not be able to finish a job if you threatened to fire him. But as a team, they worked out splendid. They typically had their releases based on the same storyboards ready before we'd had the skeleton fleshed out.
