Title: Imaginary friends

Author: Bob Schmidt

Date: 05 March 2020 23:16:09 +00:00 or Thu, 05 March 2020 23:16:09 +00:00

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I guess it happens to all programmers at some point. You’re in the office late, and alone, trying to track down some intermittent bug, or crack a gnarly problem, and the later you stay, the more tired you get, and the solution just seems to get further and further away. Sometimes you can end up making matters worse as you hack and chop your way through the code, getting ever more frustrated until you eventually give up and go home. In the morning, someone drops by your desk to ask how things are going, and as you start to explain your problem, the solution drops out of the sky, just like that. Huh.

Sometimes the act of explaining a problem to someone inspires you to discover the solution as you’re talking. The process of explaining forces you to get your thoughts into a sensible order. The really interesting thing is, you don’t actually need a person for this to work. It’s not a new idea, and is variously known as the ‘cardboard programmer’ and (my favourite) ‘rubber duck debugging’. The idea is you only have to pretend that you’re explaining to someone who can actually help you out. It really can work with a rubber duck!

It can also help to write things down. When people say that writing articles can really help you deeply understand something, it’s because an article forces you to get your thoughts into line, and also to explore some corners of the topic you might not ordinarily think of. The same principle applies to creating a talk or presentation. When you’re writing an article or presentation, you’re really about explaining things to people who aren’t actually there! This adds a further dimension, because you find yourself having to think about what those imaginary people might want to get out of the final result.

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