A blog as a rubber duck

I’ve always liked the concept of rubber duck debugging. It makes intuitive sense to me that talking through a problem is a great way to help the puzzle pieces fall into place in your head, or to get out of a rut in your pattern of thinking.

While I’ve never been able to get past the awkwardness of actually talking to a rubber duck sitting on my desk, it occurred to me that writing in a blog might be a good way to roll thoughts around in my head, and a good way to share things if I come up with something interesting. So here we go.

Perhaps troubled by the idea that I won’t come up with anything interesting to write about, I found myself making a custom theme for the blog. My goal was to make it as simple as possible, as I have a tendency, when starting new projects, to find something that must be done before commencing with the “real” work, then I’ll spend days working through this artificially inflated first step, and lose steam on the project as a whole.

I’ve done this plenty of times with new ideas I have for websites or apps: I’ll get a great idea I want to hack together, then spend the whole weekend fiddling about with the server configuration or wasting time setting up an unnecessarily complex automated toolchain. Then some time goes by, picking up where I left off seems daunting and the idea languishes on the back burner, making me feel guilty for ignoring it. Come to think of it, I may have just found a topic for another post…