Appreciation post: the 'rubber duck' method saved me 4 hours of headache last night

I was coding a simple login page for a project I'm learning from. Spent a solid 4 hours stuck on why my form validation kept crashing. I was about to throw my laptop out the window. Then I remembered some thread I saw about explaining your code out loud to a rubber duck. I grabbed a half empty water bottle from my desk and started talking through each line. On my third explanation I realized I was checking the input length before the variable even got defined. Felt like an absolute goof but it worked. Has anyone else had a stupid simple fix like this after talking it out loud to something?

3 comments

3 Comments

alice_allen55d ago

You spent four hours on moving a line of code around? I would have lost my mind after twenty minutes!

morgan.jason5d ago

Man that's totally how debugging goes sometimes, you gotta wonder if the universe just messes with us on purpose lol. It's like building a lego set only to realize one brick was one stud off the whole time.

beth_park5d ago

You know what's wild though @alice_allen5, sometimes that one line of code isn't even wrong technically, it's just in the wrong spot because of how the compiler reads things. I once spent a whole afternoon on a CSS bug where the fix was literally moving a closing bracket three lines up, no joke. It was like the code was haunted or something, just sitting there knowing it was fine but the browser disagreed.