I wasn't so sure about this whole pairing thing, but much like everything else concerning DBC I just closed my eyes and jumped in... and then I opened my eyes, because its hard to code without looking. My first pairing session was utter chaos. Neither of us knew what we were doing. We were both apologizing for stepping all over each others' feet, and I doubt anyone would regard it as real pairing. The one thing I took away from it was that we completed the challenge much faster than I thought we would.
After that first experience, I have only come to appreciate pairing more and more. I now seek out a partner for as many of the challenges as I can. With every successive pair, I notice more and more how quickly we come to a conclusion. Also, we both always come away with knowledge that we hadn't even thought we had wanted. I can't count the number of methods that were alien to me before one of my pairs explained it.
While some people might consider a knowledge disparity as a negative, I revel in it. If I can teach someone something new, I only solidify my understanding of the concept, and as I mentioned before I always learn something new from them.
When it came to feedback I was even more apprehensive than I was with pairing. Giving other people feedback is difficult. Especially when I know how intimidated they are by this whole endeavor (because I am too). For the first couple of weeks I think we all pulled punches and tried to soften our feedback. I even noticed it in the meta feedback. There's no way all of my feedback was that helpful. I was relieved to see that someone rated one of my feedbacks with "Disagrees". After rereading the feedback I left I realized that it wasn't very A.S.K. In that moment I became a better feedbacker, because I wanted to make sure that those receiving my feedback (meta or otherwise) would be receiving something helpful. I've seen already that this cohort is exceptionally helpful and supportive, but if no one is willing to speak up and mention when we're failing we won't get far.