rubberducking — advisory for engineering organizations, by Mahmoud Abdelkader
You already know what’s wrong. You just haven’t said it out loud.
rubberducking [--ship-faster] [--audit] [--retainer] <your-problem>
I help founders and engineering leaders say it precisely, then rebuild how their R&D org ships: AI-native, with the bar raised, not lowered.
DESCRIPTION
Rubber duck debugging is an old programmer’s trick. You explain your code, line by line, to a rubber duck. The duck knows nothing. Somewhere around line forty you hear yourself say it, and there’s the bug.
It works because precision is most of the problem. That is now true of your whole engineering organization. Coding agents give enormous leverage to teams that can state a problem exactly, and they let teams that can’t build the wrong thing faster than ever.
I’m the duck. The difference is I talk back.
OPTIONS
- --ship-faster · Rebuild how your team ships
- Your engineers have agents. Your review process, planning, and definition of done were designed before agents existed. I work with your team to change how work gets specified, reviewed, and verified, so AI makes the org faster and the bar higher. We measure both, before and after.
- --audit <system> · Look under the hood
- Architecture, code, and security audits, and technical diligence for investors. I read systems the way I read binaries: what it actually does, not what the diagram says. Output is a written assessment you can put in front of a board.
- --retainer · Think out loud, on retainer
- Fractional CTO and standing advisory. Board conversations, org design, who to hire next and why, what to stop building. Mostly you’re hiring judgment. I go hands-on when the problem calls for it.
Intended for seed-stage founders, VP Engs at scale-ups, and PE portfolio companies.
EXIT STATUS
0 if the problem was stated precisely. Non-zero otherwise; see DESCRIPTION.
HISTORY
| 2016–2023 | VGS, co-founder & CEOBuilt data security as a service. Raised over $100M from a16z, Goldman Sachs, Vertex, and Visa. 700+ customers by 2022, including many of the Fortune 100. |
| YC W11–2015 | Balanced, co-founder & CTOPayments for marketplaces. Exited to Stripe in 2015. |
| –2010 | Milo.com, early engineerAutomated product matching. Acquired by eBay in 2010. |
| earlier | Wachovia SecuritiesHigh-frequency trading systems. |
SEE ALSO
SOURCE · most advisory work is under NDA; this isn’t
- ida-sigmaker(1)220 starsIDA Pro signature maker, SIMD-accelerated
- nose-timer(1)127 starshow long does every test take?
- ida-taskr(3)32 starsparallel computing for IDA Pro
- static_asm(3)31 starscompile-time x86/x86-64 assembler, C++
- simba(1)6 starslocal-first memory layer for coding agents
- idavator(1)4 starsIDA microcode ↔ LLVM IR
WRITING
BUGS
Does not ship with a team. You get me, not people I staff after the sales call.
No frameworks included. No maturity models, no eighty-slide deck.
May return “stop doing that.” This is intended behavior. Some of the best advice deletes work.
Measures things. If we change how you ship, we check whether it worked.