Stackoverflow as a rubber duck

This week we had the director of an external agency in the office.

During a meeting with him he brought up that back in the old

days of cubicle programmers, some would have ‘cardboard cutouts‘ to bounce ideas off when they got stuck with a problem.

I mentioned that often when I was stuck with something and went to Stackoverflow to find a solution, often in the process of typing out and explaining the problem to someone else I’d come to the solution myself.

This weekend whilst sat in the sun reading The Pragmatic Programmer , I came to the section on ‘Rubber duck debugging‘ and realised that Stackoverflow makes a great rubber duck.

As it turns out Jeff Atwood thinks so too.