Dog food & rubber ducks

I’m not a technical person. Before we started building Friday, I had basically only used AI from a distance.

“Can you ask your AI to figure out how many planks I need?” “Can you get your AI to translate my newsletter?”

No, I am truly not a developer. I’m a writer and a writing coach. I live with words and stories. That’s why only the fun technical terms stick...

Rubber ducking, for example. Or rubber duck debugging. If I’ve understood it correctly, the expression comes from the need to talk through complex problems in order to find a solution. It doesn’t really matter who’s listening — it’s the act of thinking you’re after. The process itself is what generates wisdom and insight.

A rubber duck will do as a listener. Not particularly expensive, doesn’t take up much space, and doesn’t mind sitting on a desk for endless hours waiting to be needed.

My partner likes to use me as his duck. He babbles and babbles, I don’t understand a thing, but I hum along and play the good wife. And then suddenly! There’s silence… and that kind of look that only a truly deep insight can produce. The same stillness I imagine Archimedes experienced the second before he shouted “Eureka!”

Every time it happens, I take a little bit of the credit...

Another term from the developer world that I learned recently is dogfooding. Which means roughly: developing products you actually use yourself. Being your own tester. Being your own benchmark for how good — and how useful — the thing you’re building really is. A truly good product, you’d dare to sink your own teeth into. And you wouldn’t put unhealthy ingredients in it, right?

It’s easy to hatch ideas, but much harder to tell if they’re actually worth anything. A useful clue to follow (I’ve learned this the hard way) is actually quite simple: would I use this product myself?

If the answer is yes — you’re onto something.

Friday is smarter than a rubber duck and taste better than dog food. And I use my coach — several times every day.

Rubber ducking.

Dog food.

New word coming up: foxing.

Friday the Fox — smarter than a duck, tastier than dog food.

Eureka!

This text was translated from Swedish with the help of Claude.

Photo by Melissa Walker Horn on Unsplash