Rubber Duck Sessions

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 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 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.

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 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.