The rubber duck at the head of the army

[kpreid]

You've probably heard (if you’re a programmer) about the cardboard programmer or rubber duck debugging.

These days, my rubber duck is the Ask a Question form at Stack Overflow (or another Stack Exchange Network site appropriate for the topic at hand). Writing a clear and considered question serves the same purpose as the hypothetical cardboard cutout or coworker — and if you don’t find your solution by the rubber duck method, then you have the question all ready to go, so no effort is wasted.

I haven’t gotten around to talking about it before, but I’m a big fan of Stack Exchange — it's a great place to get answers and give them, and focused on being a good resource in the long term and for all the web, not just another forum for discussions.

Comments

[dougo.livejournal.com]

In my first job out of college, I had a coworker who called that the wooden Indian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigar_store_Indian) effect. I only recently realized that this was not the common term for it.

[kpreid.livejournal.com]

Heh. A post on the exact same thing at Jeff Atwood's blog (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/03/rubber-duck-problem-solving.html) was written four hours after this one.

The inspiration for this post, for the record, was having written this comment (http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/139321/how-do-i-review-my-own-code/139381#comment262786_139381) mentioning SO questions, after rubber ducks were brought up.