Today I Learned

Now, hear me out: what if the rubber duck burned tons of energy, poisoned the water and air, caused a global shortage of computer parts, was built with material without the permission of creators, made it easy to make nonconsensual sexual images of people, and lied to you?

works even for non programming stuff. its letting our brain process the information in order ans organising it

Not a programmer but at my last job I couldnt count how many times I would walk into our engineers office and start explaining a problem only to stop mid sentence and say "wait, I'm an idiot" then walk back out. Sometimes talking about it is all you need to make the pieces fit.

This happens so often with my wife that she’s started saying “quack” when I figure it out

this is one reason I type questions out before asking them

It’s all fun and games until the duck talks back.

Real thing by the way. Works not only with programming.

True for everything I think.

I keep one on my desk just for this reference :)

This is why I put rubber ducks at all desks of my it colleagues. It helps.

Every single popcorn flick from the 80s and 90s has a main character make a big plot-resolving realization while doing early act 3 exposition

If this is such a universal human experience that we wrote it into movies made for general audiences, I think that programmers are not the only ones debugging to their ducks

The Feynman method

My wife is my rubber duck. She doesn’t mind when I explain the most jargon-heavy stuff to her.

I do this to my main analyst as a last resort; have since day 1.

"Sorry, I gotta rant this one out." Knowing full-well they have nfi what I'm going on about.

Then eventually, that feeling of a clarity bomb going off followed by a period of dopamine fallout.

I call one of my coworkers once a week with "Can I rubber duck you?" which means I'm just going to talk about my problem and explain my thought process in hopes she spots an obvious solution.

We do it to each other and 30% of the time the other dev says "why not just X" and we agree that it's pretty obvious.

I used to teach design. Before a presentation, I always asked my student to explain their project to someone with no knowledge on the subject, like their grandmother or so. Mainly to discover the logic flaws in their presentation.

A corollary to this is that it's often very difficult to explain what's wrong because if you could explain it clearly, you would probably be fixing it already.

Not quite the same, but sometimes when I’m doing a task I like to talk through what I’m doing out loud as if I was showing someone else how to do it.

I have a few Lego kits my kids have gotten me, and a small toy penguin, which I talk through things with.

Thankfully it looks like I'm just on camera. Though I work from home so it doesnt really matter.

I also treat several coworkers like my rubber ducky. I warn them first though, so I feel like its not as bad.

But isn't that well known, even from school days? If you've ever explained something to someone you've recognized that by doing that you're forced into overthinking the context, diving deeper into the subject.

I do this, but with my half-naked anime figures.

Hell, even just having a completely different conversation can sometimes lead to huge breakthroughs! I've seen it happen!

Also going for a walk, driving, or the other morning I woke up spontaneously about 2 hours early and come up with a solution.

While I havent explained my code to a rubber duck I did find The solution to my Problem just because I started to write it down in order to get help in a forum.

If rubber ducks are a sign of bugs, then I do not want a Jeep.

This has a name? I thought this was just how it works. It’s why we think out loud.

eta: thinking + speaking + hearing engages more of your brain. That’s obvious, right? More engagement == more connections?

fun fact, I used to do this and had a small mental breakdown because my piece of shit boss refused to listen to my solutions, ultimately causing me more work and stress because the solutions he forced me to implement failed even more spectacularly.

I burned the duck as an effigy of my boss when he was finally fired.

I will never have another duck.