#TechForNewbies: ‘Rubberducking’

Something wonderful happens when you endeavour to explain something in clear, simple terms, appropriate for a beginner — you crystallise the fundamentals in your own mind, and end up improving your own understanding. That is in fact one of the benefits I experience from this blog series. But how can other developers benefit from this practice, without starting their own version of #TechForNewbies, or sharing confidential information about their client’s systems and data?

Introducing a concept called ‘rubberducking’.

Picture this scenario:

You are designing a complex solution and need to present it to a senior stakeholder in clear terms so they can sign off costs. To practice your presentation, you make eye contact with a little rubber duck on your desk, and explain what you are working on, out loud, in simple enough terms that the rubber duck can follow what you are saying.

That is ‘rubberducking’; explaining your work out loud, in as simple terms as possible — so that even a rubber duck can understand.

Admittedly, it does not have to be a rubber duck to work — but the concept is the same whether it is a bao bun stress ball, a photo of your dog, or even an imaginary friend.

The benefits of rubberducking are not just that you get some public speaking practice in; you can also use it to ensure your solution makes sense — like proofreading an essay out loud, you are spicing up the variety of senses you engage to test your articulation of your work.

Rubberducking is a very valuable and legitimate approach to debugging, too — see this fantastic video on ‘rubber duck debugging’ by CheersKevin or this Coding Horror article about the benefits of articulating your problem properly to see just how useful this practice can be.

Even when you are not debugging, it is critical that you can always explain your work or code to a less knowledgable audience. You could need to do so in order to win funding, explain an incident, manage risk, or onboard new team members — so ensuring it is not all ‘in your head’ will make you a stronger developer, on this project and all future work.

Image by Joko Sutrisno