In my spare time I’m reading “Think like a Programmer. An introduction to creative problem solving” and I’d like to share with my followers some things that I learnt in first chapters of this book.
I’ve learnt 10 good rules to approach any problem/algorithm that you can meet during your daily job as developer:
- study the constrains of the project, so important to define the area of your project and how to approach it
- find analogies of problems that you solved in the past, it could help to resolve the new one
- divide the whole project in small tasks it helps to focalize and to define better the effort of each task
- starting with the known tasks and then go ahead with others (in that case I usually start with what I don’t know, because after that, I can go ahead quickly with the rest of the project, it works with me đ )
- divide any problem in different parts, it’s more easy solve small issues than 1 big
- you ALWAYS need a plan to solve a problem (using collateral thought, I suggest to start with Google, in most cases someone else has approached the same problem and probably solved it)
- try to watch the problem in different way, it’s essential to find the right solution to implement the algorithm in your project
- make own the solutions of issues, it’s so important because next time you’ll find a problem you’ll know how to approach it (point 2 of this list)
- create samples highly focused on a particular functionality to accomplish your tasks, sometimes make a simple example helps your to find the solution of a big problem.
- don’t get disheartened on a problem, it’s normal to find them, it’s your job!!!
I hope could help many developers that start to approach this job and, to the others, I hope you use many of those tricks in your projects and if you have another feel free to share them with a comment to this post.
If I’ll found more tricks to share reading this cool book I’ll post them again.
Finally If you are interested to read it, I’ll share the link here.
lucamezzalira.com 