Ducks in a Row

(An experiment in stakeholder management, creativity and vibe coding)

Some months ago, I came into the possession of a bag of 10 small rubber ducks. The reasons why are on a need-to-know basis, and you probably don’t need to know.

I thought about turning them into art. Originally, I was going to glue them to a blue canvas and hang them on the wall.

But I worried about the permanence of glueing them. It felt wrong, somehow. What if I could make them movable? I purchased a 50cm square Blue magnetic “whiteboard”, a bag of magnets, and the minor rubber duck surgery required inserting the magnets into the ducks, and I had the “Ducks in a Row-ometer”…

It’s silly. But sometimes silliness can help you get to have serious conversations that seriousness prevents.

A few months on, the Ducks in a Row-ometer sits in my office, and I occasionally move it around to help me think things through.

Yesterday, I was chatting with a prospective client, and he, in passing, mentioned my ducks in a row (I’d posted about it a couple of times on LinkedIn). That triggered me to pick up ChatGPT and do something I’d meant to do for a while – create a simple digital version.

I’ve used GPT to write some simple JavaScript apps in the past, but not for some months. It’s moved on dramatically. There is a whole mechanism for handling code that is really quite impressive (to someone who hasn’t coded professionally for over 25 years).

You can read the entire transcript here:

https://chatgpt.com/share/682630e2-0130-8005-a8ea-48c9665bc67f

A few things I noted…

First of all, it’s getting much better at managing the whole process in comparison to some experiments I did 18 or so months ago. Code is handled in containers on the page, and it will rewrite entire chunks rather than the irritating “Add this bit to your code” that I used to find.

Overall, though, could someone who didn’t understand how coding, HTML, browsers, and web servers work do this? Possibly, but slowly. I’ve built up a lot of contextual knowledge over the years, which means I can spot problems (for example, it wanted to pick an image up from the web browser, but security stopped that from working).

It was also built from the outset assuming only PC/Mac use, and then making the HTML app touch-friendly meant quite a bit of reworking at the end.

I was really impressed by how it suggested refinements and features. The digital ducks, for example, have mood rings.

Anyway, here’s the final app—it’s not the best application in the world, but I developed it in about two hours, much of which was while I was sitting on the train…

https://mattballantine.static.domains/ducksinarow/