Working in someone else's kitchen
Yesterday I was pairing remotely with one of my colleague. He hosted a tmate session for me on his system. His preference of editor is Vim and I use Emacs. We were discussing some ideas on functions and what they would do and taking turn on writing the code. I know little bit of Vim, but my muscle memories are not tuned for Vim as much as they are for Emacs. So it took a while for me, I asked some silly questions on how he was doing certain things and it was nice how he was comfortably using the interface.
Today morning as I was preparing breakfast and looking for the tools in the kitchen it reminded me of yesterday's pairing session. In kitchen its the food and code in case of work. Just the tools are placed in different location and there are other ways of preparing things.
Both these exercise brings you out of your comfort zone. The keybindings for saving, editing, navigating are different in the editor. In kitchen, spices are in different box, the box itself is placed in different location, they grate the ginger instead of crushing it. It makes you more alert and self aware.