This isn’t entirely a surprise - at Truss, we try to have most of our conversations in public anyway for this very reason - but the extra step of having conversations with yourself as a teaching tool was new. I realized that this wasn’t just a great tool for me, it was something that helped the entire practice or the entire company. There was another effect though - more junior engineers or even folks from other practices would mention in the thread that they learned a lot from watching me talk something through, or seeing the discussions between myself and other senior engineers. I would start making these threads specifically to rubber duck problems, and in the message starting the thread, I say I wasn’t necessarily looking for feedback, but if people were interested I’d be happy for them to weigh in: As the project continued, it wasn’t unusual for me to start these threads and talk myself into a decision or figure out the problem.
Putting my thoughts in the thread when I had the question prevented the situation where I ask the question, don’t get a response for three hours, and then forget half the context I had when I originally asked.Īfter a while, I realized that these threads were also working great for me as just a way to rubber duck problems. That meant I was working on a lot of stuff I mostly understood but where I was running into a lot of rough edges.Īs I and the other engineers on the project started building things out, when I got stuck or when I was faced with a decision I wasn’t sure about, I started making threads in Slack on our #infrasec channel where I would put the problem I was trying to solve in the first message, then my thoughts on whatever it was in the thread. The summer after I started at Truss, I got put on a project as an infra lead, one where we were trying out a number of new approaches to building out our infrastructure and really the first time I had built out a greenfield infrastructure (mostly AWS resources and a CI/CD pipeline) from scratch.
When I started working at Truss two and a bit years ago, I had to adjust my own way of working one of the habits I picked up that has turned out to be a not-so-secret superpower has been remarkably simple: talking to myself on Slack. With more people working from home over the last year, there’s a lot of adjustments that folks are making to accommodate a new way of working.
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