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.

I was really struggling with the Big Question of being a super-senior developer: Build a business of my own? Stick with my job? Become a consultant? Find a different job or role? I started to chase all of these, and so I made progress on none of them. And I was getting increasingly frustrated about it.

Working with Avdi helped guide my thinking. In a short conversation, he was not only able to help me find the confidence and clarity I needed, but was able to talk about each of the different possibilities in enough detail that, even after my personal situation changed, it was perfectly obvious which new path I should take.

More than anything else, Avdi helped me understand what I'd be best at and what would make me happiest, and which directions would likely make me unhappy. That's knowledge I'll be able to fall back on, no matter what comes next.

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.

We were replacing some MVP logic involving state machines, guards and callbacks at the time. Avdi asked poignant questions, shared his wisdom and helped to vet the direction I was taking. Years later, the solution has held up well and been easy to maintain and build upon.

While we only had one pair session, I reflect on it from time to time and believe that my time with Avdi did convince me to think more about what the patterns we chose give back to us over time.

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.