Have you ever wondered why developers have a peculiar obsession with rubber ducks? A big part of it is tradition, but it’s stuck around this long mostly because it works. In fact, developers can use plenty of tools to be more effective, and these involve little to no electronics.
When starting your professional library (more on that later), a good first purchase is the well-loved Pragmatic Programmer. Of the many concepts popularized by this book, rubber duck debugging might be one of the strangest, at least on the surface. Once you dig into it, the tool makes a ton of sense.
While the tradition is to use a rubber duck, any external object can work. Stuffed animals, action figures, and pets all function just as well if you don’t like the aesthetic of the traditional duck. When you are stuck on a problem or want to ensure you remember a concept, you explain it out loud to your duck.
It uses the mental processes we go through while communicating ideas that don’t require another human. The most significant benefit is that explaining or teaching a concept to someone else will help you better understand it. You have to work everything out. No mental shortcuts allowed. The technique sticks around because of just how often this is enough to find a solution. For some, there will be other benefits, like not feeling like they are wasting someone’s time or that someone will judge them for not figuring things out sooner.
Digital notes have some serious advantages. They are easier to share, search, and embed related info like diagrams or links. With that on one side of the scale, it can be hard to see what a paper notebook could do to be worthwhile. However, similar to the duck, handwriting changes how we process information in a way that can be beneficial.
Writing or reading text on paper forces you to slow down. Reading a blog post or watching a YouTube video and being just as clueless at the end is a shared experience. Substituting paper for a screen won’t permanently eliminate this problem, but there is good evidence that it improves results. Writing notes instead of typing them has a similar impact; it gets you more engaged with the ideas you write down. As tools like OCR improve, you don’t have to choose with your notes. You can handwrite them initially and then use tools to digitize them for easy indexing.
A note on digital paper displays like Kindle and reMarkable. They are not the same as paper in this respect, but they can act as a reasonable compromise between digital text and handwritten ones.
For people in the tech industry, especially devs, there is an expectation that you will also code as a hobby. Whether you do this or not, having offline hobbies can be very important in maintaining your health and just bringing some variety into your life. For the min/maxxers of the world, there are two types of hobbies that suit techies very well. Physical activities, or things that make you touch grass, and ones that require a similar skillset like creative or collabrative hobbies.
There are plenty of other ways to improve your work, but here are a few others.