Pair programming

I was looking at a job description at a place I'd really like to work.  Everything about it sounded great, but it also said this:

'We pair program all day, every day because we know it delivers remarkable results.'

I have a number of concerns about pair programming.  Wouldn't there be a suffocating lack of privacy?  How can you get in the 'zone' with someone right there yammering at you?

What about when you're doing something other than coding?  At my previous job I was assigned to work on some code that was new to me.  It used an ancient proprietary framework that I wasn't that familiar with.  I spent about a week researching to understand the existing code.  If my pair programming partner knew the answers to all of my questions, great, but otherwise, how would two people effectively work on a problem like this at the same time?  Maybe it's just my imagination failing but this doesn't seem like it would work.

Here's two 'pro' articles:

I love Pair Programming
First Impressions of Paired Programming

And a 'con' article:

Why I Don't Like Pair Programming (and Why I Left Pivotal)

I decided to go ahead and apply.  I feel like this is something I need to learn to flesh out my experience and become a well-rounded developer.

Spring Web Flow

I was looking for something to walk me through Spring Web Flow in easy stages.
There's nothing on the snazzy new Guides page.

This was pretty good:

Spring Web Flow 2 Tutorial by Ivan A Krizsan

It's slightly retro (2010), but I found it pretty easy to follow and everything worked.

To get access to the Maven 'webapp-jee5' archetype, I needed to configure the Maven Central catalog as described here. 

Update: The Spring Web Flow chapter in Spring in Action is really good.  It's not free, though.

Working example at my Github repo.

I'm on Github

I've used Github for work-related stuff, so, not that big a deal, but this is my first personal Github repo:

https://github.com/BlackTrenchCoat/pokemon.git

This is my Spring and Hibernate playground.  It's a Pokemon-related app.  It's nowhere near finished (though I've been working on some version of this on and off since 2010).

I'm hoping this will be useful when prospective employers ask for code samples.  It's often a problem producing code that is 100% purely mine from work.  Plus we sure aren't doing a lot of Spring and Hibernate at my day job.