Rubber Ducking A Mentor

Over the last year I’ve been working as the lead developer at ATG Pharma. The experience has allowed me to grow me skills across all areas of the software lifestyle; making me a very well rounded software engineer. An experience that has allowed me to mentor coop students and provide best practice examples with examples of what happens when you can go down the wrong road

The experiences came with one ‘small’ downside. I’ve had little to no mentorship from a senior dev at the company. Instead I’ve had to learn from after hours research, the open source community, and problem solving with my friends in the industry as well as my mentor.

I had a big learn today though for my problem solving process and maybe it can help other software developers as well.

Sometimes explaining the problem to a friend is enough for you to figure out the problem. RubberDucking with a real person can be enough frequently. I had started to believe that when I got really stuck that I should learn to rely on my senior mentors, but that started to create an over reliance on the relationship.

But today was a good learn that sometimes you just need to step back and really look at the full problem to see where the problem could really be.

Rubber duck all your problems.