The Rubber Duck Experience

-


I mentioned in my post about the Ypsilanti Software Development Meetup Group that my friend Fritz had suggested that we have a rubber ducky for a logo. My first thought was that it was a Ypsi tie in with the Heritage Festival that has a rubber duck race every year, but when I talked to Fritz over beers this weekend, he asked if I knew what the reference was. I mentioned the Ypsi thing, but he said that it was from a story about a programmer who would carry around a rubber duck and explain his code to the duck which helped in the debugging process. 

The previous week we had been discussing asynchronous programming in JavaScript and C#, and I had mentioned how I was struggling with figuring out how to use async and await with an MVC controller that calls a service class and then a database repository. The following day he asked me for clarification on what my issue was, and as I was documenting it to respond to him, I was able to figure out how to use the await in the service class. Fritz and I work in different environments with some overlap, but just the process of talking through issues can really help in gaining understanding. 

I really like the rubber duck analogy, and it reminds me of the Feynman approach where to really master a subject, you learn by teaching it. When you try to teach something to a novice, you have to understand the topic on a much deeper level than if you are just trying to understand it for yourself. One of the reasons I write blog posts and Wiki articles is so I can reinforce the things I have learned. They are also great references for things that I forget since they are written in my own words. I guess now I am going to have to get a rubber duck for my desk. 

Here is the wiki article on Rubber Duck Debugging. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

Do you have any tricks that help you learn new things or retain information better? Let me know in the comments. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Asp.Net Core with Extended Identity and Jwt Auth Walkthrough

-
Image
  Quite often I think of an idea for an app where I would have a website and a mobile app that share the same functionality. Every time I start to prototype something like this I get stuck on authentication. When you build a web application in Asp.Net Core, it is really easy to set up the built-in Identity platform to allow users to login, but if you want to allow a mobile app to access APIs on the same site, that takes a lot more work. Of course, you can use a cloud-based authentication system like AzureAd or Firebase authentication, but if you arent housing any sensitive data, that's a lot of extra plumbing that takes away from building your application.  This walkthrough will show you how to create an Asp.Net core site with Asp.Net Core Identity for authentication and authorization. We will be extending the identity to include additional user information and roles. We will also add jwt authentication and authorization, so SPA's and mobile apps can use the API's and share...
Read more

File Backups to Dropbox with PowerShell

-
Image
I have had a number of instances where I had a virtual server somewhere, and I wanted to have a backup strategy, but the paid plans were overkill for what I needed. I have all my source code in Github, so everything can be rebuilt. I just need to be able to archive database backups and uploaded files. I decided to use a Dropbox account and set up a scheduled task that calls a PowerShell script that accesses the Dropbox web API. Setting up Dropbox You will need to have a Dropbox subscription set up and then you can go to the developer's section at the following link: {% embed url=" https://www.dropbox.com/developers " %} On the main page, select create apps. On the following page, you will have the option to select the scope of the app. Here you can decide to only access a single folder or give access to all of the Dropbox functions. Either option will work, in my example, I used the full access scope, so I would have the option of putting different file types in different...
Read more

Dynamic Expression Builder with EF Core

-
I was recently working on an ASP.NET Core MVC project where the end user wanted to have a search form with several fields with drop down boxes and a couple of free-form text fields. One of the requirements was to be able to put "*" at the front or the end of a search term in the text boxes to indicate a wildcard search. That was the way a previous application worked and they wanted to maintain the same functionality. Since I was working with Entity Framework Core using a generic repository pattern, I wanted to be able to dynamically build the filter expression that I passed to the repository. I created a static Expression builder class with static methods for creating each type of expression needed. public static class ExpressionBuilder { public static Expression GetStringExpression ( string dataModelProperty , string dtoProperty , Expression combinedExpression , ParameterExpression parameterExpression ) { if ( dtoProperty...
Read more