[dwd]

There has been many a time where the process of thinking through in my head how I was going to describe the problem to someone else on the way over to them, that a testable idea pops up.

Could probably have gone for a walk around the block instead, but the formulation of the problem to be able to explain it to someone else seems to be key.

[japanuspus]

This is what I miss from (the early) Stack Overflow: often the process of writing up a well-framed question ended up solving the problem.

I sometimes put out the question anyway and added an answer. Never quite figured out if this was considered bad style.

[dwd]

Jeff Attwood in his Coding Horror post about Rubber Duck Debugging mentioned that as well. I would think he wouldn't have considered it bad style.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/rubber-duck-problem-solving/