Being involved with software professionally and woodworking as a hobby, I can recommend that talk. The parallels he draws are so good that I was almost angry with myself for not seeing them before watching that talk.
That part where you have to make a commit in order to attempt to fix a CI problem was driving me nuts. It‘s the same with Travis.
Concourse gets this right - you can run a pipeline task as a one-off from your workstation until it’s done, and only then check it in. And even ssh into the build container in order to debug build failures.
I leave the handling of those situations to Lastpass. My wife and kids may request access to my password locker, and if I don't reject within 30 days the locker is opened to them.
Not sure how your current builds look like, but I tend not having to deal with containers per se. All they force you to do is be explicit about the build‘s dependencies, which I think is a useful thing.
My approach for migrating existing builds to Concourse is to start with a stock image (alpine or ubuntu), and gradually add things that are missing (`fly execute` is a big help for that).
Once I have a successful build, I extract the prerequisites into a task image (but that really is an optimization).
How do you see this being used in pair programming? To me, the key is to work on the same thing, one person being the navigator (“where to go”), and the other being the driver (“handling the pedals and the steering”). In this mode, there is only one keyboard and one thing to look at. Why would you want a split screen?
Not sure if this particular library is an improvement, but even if it serves nothing but the author’s enjoyment, or education, it’s a win.