Do you Rubber Plant? Or do you Rubber Duckie?

Question

So, I wrote a question earlier which, having written it, I realised I knew the answer! And someone else helpfully confirmed it for me. This is pretty common in coding... Which led me to think it might be fun to ask something of the community... read on to find out what Rubber Plants and Duckies have to do with it :-)

An old friend of mine, when coding, once asked if he could “Rubber Plant” me. I had no idea what he meant! He explained, that it is really common that, when you can’t solve a code problem, you go to ask a coder friend, let’s call her Sita. And as you explain the problem to Sita, you realise you have worked out the answer, just like I did above in my discussion forum question! Since, Sita didn’t have to say a word, you might as well have gone and explained your problem to a rubber plant in the office, you would still have worked out the answer, and wouldn’t have had to distract Sita from her work! Hence, “Rubber Planting”, when you have to work something out by talking about it to an audience...

Now, since then, I find another friend’s office have “Coding Duckies”. Little rubber ducks that all the coders get to sit on their monitor and have to talk to first before bugging someone else!

So my question to you all out there is: what do you have? Do you have a Rubber Plant or a Rubber Duckie? And if you don’t, do you think it might help?

Maybe we could have a SoloLearn Rubber Duckie forum? Where we have to post questions first, and if we still can’t work it out, then we can send it for asking in the community! Maybe SoloLearn could prompt us occasionally to find out if we solved it ourselves and we can update our answer :-)

Anyway! Which side are you on? Talk to the Plant? Or talk to the duck?

:-D

Answer 1

Give this man a 🍪 (or a rubber plant🌾🌵)

Answer 2

My Rubber Duck is google. When facing a complicated problem, first I have to formulate the right questions, how I would go about solving it. Which points are not clear, what can I figure out simply by looking at documentation. Sometimes it helps me to visualize things, just draw some flowchart and connect the boxes, either on paper or in my head.
Once I have my questions clear (I know what I DON'T know), then I try google, and it turns out usually there is some forum on stackoverflow or somewhere else where this question was already asked.

Answer 3

Hmm. So the equivalent here, Tibor, is how often do you find that, having written the question on Stack Overflow, that by the time you finish writing it, you have worked out the answer?

Answer 4

We all Google first before we ask someone! Don’t we? I hope we do!