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

Comments

[dougo]

In my first job out of college, I had a coworker who called that the wooden Indian effect. I only recently realized that this was not the common term for it.

[kpreid]

Heh. A post on the exact same thing at Jeff Atwood's blog was written four hours after this one.

The inspiration for this post, for the record, was having written this comment mentioning SO questions, after rubber ducks were brought up.