Rubber Duck Sessions

In a word, excellent! Avdi was enthusiastic about making sure my questions were answered, as well as giving me design tips. At the end of the session he provided me with a list of notes and links that were relevant to the discussions I had with him during our time together.

[Afterwards] I was far more confident specing out systems with POROs and structs. Additionally I found myself thinking about the object design for a given project as a whole as opposed to a mish-mash of disparate entities.

I have, at various points, worked for the same company as Avdi, engaged him for remote pair-programming sessions after that because I missed his enthusiasm and insight, bought copies of “Exceptional Ruby“ and “Confident Code” for all the junior developers on a team because that seemed the quickest way to bring everybody up to speed and give them a common idiom, and had a prototype rubber duck session earlier this year. When it has been necessary to reignite enthusiasm or provide a lateral insight into an intractable problem, Avdi has at more than one point proven invaluable.

Brilliant. Two examples, six years apart, of things I would not have thought of but were evidently true once Avdi pointed them out were that Cucumber need not be restricted to integration tests but could usefully build unit tests where the SUT has sufficiently complex logic that expressing the behaviour in words as well as code would very likely result in a clearer understanding and therefore a clearer implementation, and that “marketing“, while not an obvious example of the Pragmatic Programmers’ “learn one new language a year”, was potentially the most important of all.

My experience pairing with Avdi was fantastic and I wholeheartedly recommend the opportunity to code with him. He was patient, interested, focused, and opinionated in all of the right ways. On top of that, he's nice! Which makes it all a lot easier. It was really great to see how fluid and clear his thought process was and having him able to work with me to catch up was great.

I had some general goals in terms of making certain parts of a Gem that I'm working on better as well as addressing some uncertainties I had around some API testing practices. Fantastically, his advice on testing and some specific refactoring helped make it apparent when you run into an opportunity for dependency injection.

its been a few years since I paired with Avdi, but I still draw from that experience to this day. I was hoping to get some clear direction on schema and architecture and get me going down a decent path with my project. Avdi was very helpful and we broke the problem domain down and created an approach to solve it.

Pairing with Avdi was a bit intimidating at first, but that quickly turned into excitement. I never felt like I was 'inferior' or the lesser 'half' of the pair (even if that was definitely the case). He always went at my pace, and stopped to explain each step along the way. And more importantly the reasoning behind the decision.

I think I went into our first session with a bit of an inferiority complex, and when we got into a a bit of a corner, Avdi actually had to look up something in the rails documentation. I thought "wow" even someone as "ruby famous" as Avdi has to look up stuff! Just like me! Reflecting back, of course he does not have the entire Ruby and Rails API memorized, but I no longer feel inferior when I have to reference documentation.

I just wanted to chat about the future, the industry and very complex high-level stuff. He spent a lot of time listening because there was quite a bit of context to baseline. Avdi is a great listener. He's a "reference spec" listener to me.