mdlbear | Entries tagged with debugging

I mentioned rubber ducks in yesterday's Thankful Thursday. Here, lightly edited, is something I wrote on 7Cups.com, inspired by Rubber Duck Debugging – Debugging software with a rubber ducky:

Well, there are two different kinds of problems. There are the problems that you can't solve without specialized information or skills that you simply have no way of knowing. And then there are the problems that you actually can solve -- you have all the facts -- but you're missing that one key insight that makes the solution obvious. You're just about to turn the last page in the book, you know everything the detective knows, but you're still baffled.

The best way to tell which is which is to explain the problem in excruciating detail. Whether it's to a therapist, a friend, a 7cups listener, your cat, or a rubber duck doesn't matter, but it's easier to find a rubber duck. If you get to a point where you can say to yourself "oh... right... of course!" you have a problem of the second kind. If you don't, you need to put your rubber duck back in the bathtub and explain your problem to a human who knows more than you do about that kind of problem, or can refer you to someone who does.

That usually means a therapist; but a good listener may be able to come up with questions that point you toward a solution. A rubber duck is a little limited in that respect. But treating your journal as a rubber duck will give you a good description of the problem that you can hand to a therapist, which will save a lot of time.

The cover article in April 2nd's Computerworld was titled Asperger's and IT: Dark secret or open secret? OK, if you have to ask you haven't been paying attention. It does raise the very legitimate question of "If Aspies are everywhere among us, why isn't the IT industry doing more to support them or even to simply acknowledge their existence?"

High-tech companies, after all, have been at the forefront of supporting workers with nearly every type of social, ethnic, physical or developmental identification. Microsoft, to take just one example, sponsors at least 20 affinity groups -- for African Americans, dads, deaf and hard of hearing, visually impaired, Singaporeans, single parents, and gay/lesbian/bisexual and transgendered employees, to name a few. Just nothing for autistics.

But this isn't a song about ~~Alice~~ Microsoft, or even about IT.

I've noticed that I tend to approach people and relationships almost exactly the same way I approach any other technical problem, for example an unfamiliar piece of software. I don't have the automatic understanding of other people that ordinary humans seem to have: I have to treat each problem analytically.

And, of course, since another symptom of Asperger's is an ability to concentrate on one problem, and a corresponding inability to multitask, this can come across either as a possibly-disturbing intensity of focus, or an annoying inability to drop a subject. Sorry about that; I'm working on it. As a technical problem, of course.

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