Cardboard Dogs and Rubber Ducks in Software Development

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jessica. I’m calling from Carmel, Indiana.

Hi, Jessica.

How are you doing?

Doing well.

What can we do for you?

So you were talking about terms that are used like in your industry. In my industry, in software development, there’s this term rubber duck that you use for, like if you’re trying to debug a problem that you have and you’re explaining what the problem is, then you realize what the answer is yourself without the person you’re talking to having had to give you any input. So it’s the idea is kind of like you might as well have been explaining it to a rubber duck. But in my office, we always use the term cardboard dog for that instead of rubber duck.

So you might have this scenario where you’re trying to debug something, you call somebody over to help you, and then you realize the problem yourself. And you might say, hey, thanks for being my cardboard dog, or they’ll say, like, oh, glad I could be your cardboard dog. And I have never heard that outside of my own office. So I wasn’t sure if that’s like a common thing in the industry or if that’s just something, you know, one person came up with and it’s carried through just for us.

Yeah, what a handy strategy, right? I love the idea of rubber duck debugging, where you just pretend like you’re explaining the problem to somebody else, like a rubber duck in your hand. And apparently this goes back to a book published in 1999 called The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas that had a story about a programmer who kept a rubber duck handy and would just force themselves to explain the problem line by line to that little rubber duck.

And you can sometimes work out a problem that way if you’re simplifying it for somebody else, right? You’re thinking through it aloud. And I think, you know, whether you’re a computer programmer or just trying to write something and you can’t quite express yourself, it’s a great exercise to just go to somebody. I mean, I used to love as a journalist saying, explain it to me like I’m in eighth grade or something like that. Or, you know, explain to me like I’m five years old. And that’s all kind of a piece with rubber duck debugging. But cardboard dog is an interesting one, too.

Yeah, and we know a little bit about its history. If you Google it, you might come across the site of Stephen Baker, and he has a story about a cardboard cutout dog. And he goes on to tell this pretty fanciful story about Jake the Yellow Labrador who, in exchange for dog biscuits and scratches behind the ear, would listen to walkthroughs of computer problems, unlike Tinkerbell the cat, who would not listen. And managers and consultants and engineers cost money, but Jake, who had a great attention span, wouldn’t get distracted and had a $0 hourly rate.

But supposedly, Jake passed on or listening to a particularly thorny software problem, so they replaced him with the cardboard cutout dog. And anyway, I reached out to Stephen Baker and asked him about the story, and he says, well, the story is mostly made up. He does believe that he coined the term cardboard cutout dog, and it comes from some joke that he used to tell back in the old days of Usenet. If you remember, this was discussion on the internet before there was even a web.

I’ve looked for it on Usenet. There are archives on Google Groups, and I haven’t been able to find it. So it’s at least as old as 2003 when he posted this story to his website. But he says it’s probably older than that. So Stephen Baker of Texas probably was the coin for this. So far, there are no other claimants.

That’s fascinating. I didn’t realize you’d be able to even find that it came from like one person.

Well, this is the nice thing about the computer world is it’s not so old that we can’t still reach out to some of the long beards, you know, and the Unix heads and get their stories. So I guess it is not just our office then. It’s anybody who happened to read this person’s website probably.

Yeah, it got passed around a lot, and you’ll find it. And even I think it’s actually linked as a footnote on the rubber duck programming Wikipedia page.

Next time, I’ll remember to check the footnotes.

Thank you.

Cool.

Well, thank you so much for this question. I just love the concept.

Thank you.

Yeah, thanks for taking my call.

Take care.

Be well.

Have a good day.

Bye.

You too.

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