Today, 13 years ago I attended my first Open Source Night in Baltimore, a place to create, tinker and hack something together.

The Ruby meetup was designed to introduce newcomers to open source while giving the opportunity for non-newcomers to demonstrate their know how and mastery by way of a live hack.

The structured format centers around a live hack and pairing. The pairing is between two or three people. At least 5 pairs I recall. The senior software developer sat between two of us and observed our work, line by line, to ensure we understood not just the why but the how.

We had errors. We had lots of questions. We were learning something new and pairing made it less scary than if we had been navigating it alone.

The objective: emulate the live application on our machines and ensure localhost:4000 produced the same results.

Pairing has significant benefits not the least accelerating our pathway to much faster results. The key is to know who and when to pair with. The more important key is to never stop tinkering and building. It’s the most important way to learn, get traction and validate the business model.