Pair programming is the single most important habit I've developed to improve my coding.

Pair programming is a practice of spending 30-60 minutes with a partner live-coding on-screen. It is standard practice among software development teams, but data scientists rarely borrow this exercise for their work.

If you haven't tried it, here's 3 reasons why you should:

Reason #1: Establish consistency

It's no secret - the key to mastering SQL and Python is through daily practice.

A weekly (or daily) pair programming schedule forces accountability with your peers and will establish a great habit.

Reason #2: Break through plateaus with feedback

There is more to learn about data science than you can ever hope to remember (much less master).

Live feedback from your peers provides insight about techniques you may never learn otherwise.

Reason #3: Write production-quality code

Code reviews suck. And in research-driven data science teams, most people skip them.

This is a horrible long-term practice. Pair programming solves this by putting extra sets of eyes on your code from the minute you write it.