Technical Problem Solving –
Sprint Four
When were you blocked on a simple problem?
Well, let me tell you all about something called a method. So what do we know about methods? Well, they execute as a function, and to do that we need to use two parentheses like so (). In a way, they are the big green button that says go! So, have you ever done that thing when you spend ages looking for something which turns out to just be in your hand the entire time? Well this is basically what happened.
The problem was mostly straightforward – imagine you wanted to organise your skittles into coloured groups because you only wanted to eat the red ones and the purple ones (best flavours). You would ideally separate them first, then scoop up the red ones and put them with the purple ones. This was kind of what I had to do here, except I was trying to make certain words lower case when mixed with other words in a sentence. Now, this was the syntax I was stuck on:
I tried many methods to solve this, checking the console, googling for a long, long time. But nothing seemed to help. I moved things around, kept hitting that run button, again nothing worked. That was until I asked a peer for some assistance. Now to me, this is an accurate illustration of what I saw...
I felt pretty frustrated at the time because I felt like I had done much worse than I actually had, not realising the simplicity of my mistake. After I realised what was wrong, I felt relieved, and maybe just a little bit blind. I was able to work back through my problem, figure out what had happened, and then made some notes for next time.
When did you elegantly solve a problem?
There was no specific problem here, but this whole exercise was awesome. Something really clicked in my brain when it came to objects. I think the fact they nest sort of like HTML elements helped me to grasp the concept easily. There was one part of this that required me to link adams spouse back to terah and I was stumped for a little bit, so after receiving some advice on how to approach the task, I refactored my code and that helped me to see where I was going wrong.
Over all I felt pleased with myself about this activity and it gave me a serious confidence boost that spurred me on to start getting stuck in to the next task. I think the main thing I took away from solving this problem was that it's important to try and relate problems or new processes to things you are already familiar with as it can help strengthen your understanding.
How confident you feel using each of these problem-solving techniques/processes?
I’ve decided to rate my confidence on a scale of 1 – 5 ✦ with 5 being very confident and one being not confident at all.
Pseudocode ✦ ✦ ✦
Trying something ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦
Rubber ducky method ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦
Reading error messages ✦ ✦
Console.logging ✦ ✦ ✦
Googling ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦
Asking your peers for help ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦
Asking coaches for help ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦
Improving your process with reflection ✦ ✦ ✦
