Rubber Duck Debugging 🐤

In software engineering, rubber duck debugging or rubber ducking is a method of debugging code. 🐞

The name is a reference to a story in the book The Pragmatic Programmer in which a programmer would carry around a rubber duck and debug their code by forcing themselves to explain it, line-by-line, to the duck. 🗣

Many other terms exist for this technique, often involving different inanimate objects.

Many programmers have had the experience of explaining a programming problem to someone else, possibly even to someone who knows nothing about programming, and then hitting upon the solution in the process of explaining the problem. 👥

In describing what the code is supposed to do and observing what it actually does, any incongruity between these two becomes apparent. ↔️

More generally, teaching a subject forces its evaluation from different perspectives and can provide a deeper understanding. 👨🏻‍🏫

By using an inanimate object, the programmer can try to accomplish this without having to interrupt anyone else. 🙅🏻‍♂️

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