How do you acquire problem-solving skills and how do you get better at solving problems as a developer? Let’s talk about that today.
Again, the question is how do you get better at problem-solving, as a developer? Well, first and foremost, I would suggest that it’s practise. So the more time you spend programming, the better you get at solving specific problems and that’s because you’re actually going through the process of solving problems. So if you think about it, when you first start out programming, even the most basic of problems, like how to print something onto the screen, for example, seems insurmountably hard. So you don’t know how to do it. But as you learn how to do that, you can take your problem-solving to the next level. You’ll learn how to print something on the screen. Then you might wanna figure out how to calculate something and you’ll figure that out and so on and so forth.
So, just the process of going through practicing with code, going through a course, or a book or something, or some material teaching you, will actually get you better problem-solving but definitely practice. I have a link up here of a previous video I’ve done on practice and how practice will make you better at things. But also, the other thing, the other way to get better is to use common systems that have been introduced or created over the years to make life easier. Now, there’s a concept called design patterns and I released a video a few days back on that, so click on the link to check out that video about design patterns, because what design patterns are are a common way to solve specific problems in software development.
So if you wanna know how to solve a specific problem and you get caught at design patterns and go through that process, you’ll be able to solve specific problems based on using those reusable design patterns. So check out that video. So a lot of it comes down to experience and practice as I’ve said, but basically try and take advantage of things like frameworks, and design patterns, algorithms, data structures. Understand all these things because that’ll actually solve a lot of these problems for you. So it’s key when you’re learning as a programmer, to start understanding the basics of programming. But as you get more experience you wanna start looking for these other frameworks and looking for things like design patterns as I’ve talked about, algorithms, data structures, because these are all pre-written code techniques, designs or templates that are designed to save you time and also designed to solve common problems that typically come up in most software development projects.
So check those videos out and try and hone your skills and learn more about design patterns, algorithms, data structures, and practice. All of things will make you a better programmer and make you also a better problem-solver. I hope that helped. If you’ve got any questions feel free to leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.