Rubber Duck Sessions

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.

Avdi was full of helpful advice with regards to refactoring, testing and TDD-ing. The gems he suggested I still use today (such as VCR).

Avdi stepped in and validated what our development team was doing. As in technical founders, (flounders), he reassured us and gave us actionable ways to make sure our team was hitting milestones.

Avdi needs to be top of your list. The closer he is to your work and your team, the better.

I needed a different perspective on improving the code structure and interactions for a few SOA Ruby apps.

The pairing experience was natural, well-paced, insightful and, most important, helpful. We explored multiple alternatives, and sure enough, the optimal changes became clear and simple. Pairing is all about communication, and Avdi is an excellent communicator, it was a pleasure exploring different ideas.

Pairing with Avdi helped me slow down, learn to entertain ideas more and not become too attached to intermediary iterations. It taught me that all understanding is temporal and it's most valuable to continue exploring and improving, in the most playful and easy-going way possible.

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.