This article has been imported from coding4.gaiama.org and is not necessarily up to date!

Rubber Ducking

Oooh this one is soo so helpful. Even if I just learned about the name and that it's a thing. Of course it is, I find that I'm almost never the only one doing anything 🤦‍♂️

TL;DR

Explaining your situation to a rubber duck and let it help you debug your problem. Also called "rubber duck debugging".

Talking to a rubber duck?

Actually, it doesn't matter what or who you're talking to. As long as you're verbalizing your issue.

I do this all the time. So far I never used an object, tho it might come in handy one day, who knows.

Sometimes the solution starts to emerge while I'm figuring out how to verbalize the thing as simple & non-techy as possible.

And I think that's an important point of the whole thing. Talking to someone or something changes the way I think about it. I start to look at it from a different, more user-like perspective.

Updates

I plan to add real life examples, tho I need to write them down the next time, as I don't remember anything detailed enough right now^^ I'll tweet the post updates separately as they happen at @Coding4GaiAma.

Additional reads

• Rubber duck debugging on Wikipedia
• Also there's a tech podcast named rubber ducking