27 August 2014

Rubber Ducking with Git

You've heard of the phenomenon where when you try to explain a hard problem to someone else, you suddenly know the answer, and the other person did nothing but listen to you ramble.

On the C2 wiki, it's called:



The theory I have about the phenomenon is that in a problem solving situation, the human mind develops a lot of parallel ideas & possible solutions, even ones that you are not aware of.  But when you try to describe the problem and your ideas to someone else, just the act of trying to explain the situation helps you see it more clearly and links the ideas together better in a way that you become aware of more possibilities than you were able to see before.

But I've always had a problem talking to inanimate objects.  Call me less imaginative, I guess.  Or timid, maybe.

Well, I've had the feeling for a while now that using Git with small commits made me more productive.  And I just realized, I'm using my future self as a rubber ducky, and that the act of writing explanatory commit messages to explain things to my future self is a source of ideas for me.