Rubber Duck Text Editor

Lately I've found myself opening up a text editor every day at work and commentating on my daily tasks.

This not only acts as a sort of archive but also as a means of troubleshooting. Typing out my thought process acts as guardrails when approaching a problem. With those guardrails I can navigate down each possible solution until the proper fix is stumbled upon a couple paragraphs later.

It reminds me of something I heard of lately called rubber duck debugging:

The rubber duck debugging method is as follows:

  1. Beg, borrow, steal, buy, fabricate or otherwise obtain a rubber duck (bathtub variety).

  2. Place rubber duck on desk and inform it you are just going to go over some code with it, if that’s all right.

  3. Explain to the duck what your code is supposed to do, and then go into detail and explain your code line by line.

  4. At some point you will tell the duck what you are doing next and then realise that that is not in fact what you are actually doing. The duck will sit there serenely, happy in the knowledge that it has helped you on your way.

Perhaps I am using the text editor partly as a journal and partly as a rubber duck.