Give A Blog A Good Name

As I stated in my "Hello World" post, this blog is mainly intended to be my personal book journal. Despite the blogs purpose, I didn't want to limit it's scope unecessarily and thought I should give it a broader name than just "Book Blog" which is what I had started calling it. During a brief period of cleverness (while doing something completely unrelated) I came up with the name "Bug, Duck, Goose", a play on the children's game "Duck, Duck, Goose."

Now please sit tight and allow me to explain the cleverness behind the name by talking first about bugs. My dayjob consistsof developing a little bit of software to aid the development of even more firmware. For whatever reason, bugs are pretty much inevitable in any of the projects that I have been exposed to in my education and career. It's a natural part of software development and the reason that debugging and testing practices are necessary.

Ducks are an invaluable way to debug issues in code. The idea here, which is not my own (the origins of rubber duck debugging could be found by a quick Google search), is that if a person who is developing a piece of software runs into a bug they may figure out how to fix the bug if they can explain the problem to a rubber duck. The rubber duck here isn't important, it could be any animal or coworker for that matter. This method is so effective that I have a rubber duck (with sunglasses) on my desk at work that sits even closer to me than my nearest coworker. I also try my best to provide rubber ducks to anyone in need of one at my work.

Geese are a common sighting at my companies' campus which has a small pond and quite a bit of grass. Every spring we get large flocks of both Canadian and Cackling geese. Putting goose in the blog's name seemed natural since I often swivel around in my chair while debugging an issue and watch the geese graze their way across our fields of grass. As a semi-related anecdote my team at work has spotted a tracked goose twice in the past couple of years and submitted the collared goose's name to the USGS. The goose's name will be omitted from this blog for privacy reasons but he has become somewhat of a mascot to our team.

I hope this posting gives a bit more insight into the blogs name which may seem a bit silly at first. I also hope you find it clever and don't think I'm just a quack.

In addition, keeping with the unecessarily restrictive book-related scope of this blog, the name of this post is inspired by Part 4, Chapter 7 of How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie. Our dog's name is Bruce and he is a good boy.