Nick
November 13, 2019
The rubber duck has been a serenely caring partner for many programmers all over the world. Despite the funny phrase and initially bizarre concept—rubber duck debugging is a well-known programming practice used by both veteran and novice programmers, often used to crack the problem encountered with their code.
The rubber duck term originates from a book titled the Pragmatic programmer writing by Andrew Hunt. The rubber duck comes with a lot of benefits as the name suggests it refers to debugging your code with the aid of a rubber duck. The first step requires that you obtain a rubber duck or a similar object and assemble it close to your computer, then you describe in detail each step of your code until you have noticed the problem you have been trying to fix.
Despite the usefulness of the rubber duck, it’s gradually becoming an outdated programming practice, and soon enough, many developers will be switching to something more efficient.
With new software and application like NerdVision that helps debug code faster, The rubber duck might not be able to keep up with the digital change. We have all been there. So what do you do when you have a bug in your code? One may go through the system a few times to pinpoint any undeniable blunders to discover none, the frustration that we feel while writing code or the output is far from helpful, and you have to spend countless hours going over everything with your rubber duck. This approach consumes time that can be used to create fantastic software.
Having to debug with a rubber duck takes away too much time that developers could be using for other more creative aspects of coding. Thanks to the development of modern, non-intrusive debugging tools like NerdVision that allows debugging code without needing to redeploy applications, debugging can now be accomplished so much quicker.
Let’s face it; how we develop software is changing constantly. Different environments are becoming more frequently used, and this makes managing infrastructure and accessing any code issues more difficult. This platform enables developers to include breakpoints and set schedules on the program code without altering the program execution. The biggest advantage of NerdVision is its speed and simplicity which gives developers the leverage to figure out what precisely could be wrong with an application consequently reducing the isolation time. However, it would have been nicer if the duck could actually perform the debugging process rather than sitting there just smiling.
One fantastic feature about NerdVision is that it supports all major platforms, including Amazon AWS, Docker, Azure, and Google cloud platform, as well as other significant platforms used in the software industry, which means that you will have little to worry about switching environments. NerdVision also supports a variety of languages including Java, Node.js and Python, allowing you to use the same tool in all your environments.
NerdVision is a non-blocking debugger, which provides you with the ability to have insight into any environment and resolve issues more efficiently in production, without impacting the users of your service. The rubber duck will never notify you when your tracepoint fire but NerdVision will. Allowing you to create a variety of triggers and continue with your work until the tracepoint is fired.
The benefits of using an automated debugging tool cannot be overemphasised. The rubber duck has served for many years but with platforms like NerdVision, I think it’s time to ditch the duck and embrace a new era of code debugging.
Nick is our Marketing Owner and works from our UK office, he has a wealth of experience in digital & data marketing and is a Certified Scrum Product Owner.
