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Context shifts are actually great for changing your perspective and reinvigorating your ability to work around road blocks. Switching from screen to paper is o
by PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Context shifts are actually great for changing your perspective and reinvigorating your ability to work around road blocks.
Switching from screen to paper is one way of context shifting. You could also switch a whiteboard.
You could switch to talking through the problem verbally with a colleague or, lacking that, a rubber duck.
You could just get up and go for a walk to think about that problem. Context shifting from indoors to outdoors can be a significant change.
It helps to learn how to recognize when you’re stuck, not making any progress, and have maybe a bit of “learned helplessness” slowing you down even further. Shaking up your context can help break out of it.
- dgan 5y agoI think you are right to generalise it to "context switch". Countless times I deleted my yet-to-be-posted, detailed Stackoverflow question, when after typing (ha!) it, i would realize my mistake. I never tried duck - debugging, maybe should give it a go too
- lambdaba 5y agoIt's kind of surprising that the makers of Copilot or others haven't come up with something like an automated, "smart" rubber duck.
- medstrom 5y agoA "smart" rubber duck would probably suck, because it won't ask the right questions, but I expect it's going to be a common IDE feature down the line. It'll help for some classes of problems.
- jth1 5y ago