Technical Blog - Problem Solving: Telling My Non-Tech Friend A Story About A Time When I..
.. Were Blocked On a Simple Problem and Elegantly Solved It:
It involved creating a function for that takes a parameter and re-arranges the numbet to a fixed order
The problem solving technique I used was to stop and think, then take a course of action. Like for example, I thought About what was required to solve the problem and what queries I could type on Google to in order to get the possible answer. I also broke down my course of action into simple steps, with the expectation that I won't be able to have the immediate answer at hand and had to learn to figure it out. If everything else failed then I would need ask one of the learning faciliators.
Reflected on how confident I felt using each of these problem solving techniques/processes:
- Pseudocode: very helpful in planning procedures. I normally create commented code that act like pseudocode while pondering on what to do.
- Trying something: its always good to try things rather than pondering on how to complete the work. It makes me feel less anxious.
- Rubber ducky method: using this feels like you are teaching someone who doesn't know coding. It makes it easier to simplify your problem and reflect on what you are doing, if its the right solution and if there are still bugs in the code.
- Reading error messages: this is definitely helpful in identifying the problem and copy-pasting it on Google to figure out where to find the solution.
- Console.logging: a very useful tool in figuring out if the code you are using is actually processing data correctly. Most of the time, we don't require each line of code to be output. This was helpful for me when narrowing them if my code is working correctly.
- Googling: a very useful tool, when used with error messages and pseudocode, I was able to solve nearly all of my problems. I often look for sites such as StackOverFlow for possible solutions.
- Asking your peers for help: I haven't asked many peers for help but I'm sure it will be useful in the future.
- Asking coaches for help: very helpful, often I would asked for help as a last resort. I must understand the problem first so I can ask the right questions rather than just asking because I want them to solve the problem for me. I still need to improve on this because this will be helpful in the future.
- Improving your process with reflection: its useful so I can reflect on how much I have actually learned.
Reflect on a time you were reluctant to ask for help. Consider what made you reluctant to do so. What might you try differently next time?
I felt that it wasn't a good time to ask yet because it seemed like the problem I had was easy to solve and if I did ask, I was afraid that I'd be told to continue looking into the documentation first. So my approach nowadays is to first understand the problem throughly, including the error messages so that when I ask for help it would be easy to get my point across to the facilitator and get a possible answer to my problem.