Problem Solving

Problem Solving


Beaver swimming

A time that I was blocked on a simple problem:

Earlier this week I got blocked on a problem while researching JavaScript methods. One of the methods I was researching was a math function. I wanted to show an example of an exponential math function method, and I could do the code fine but I couldn't for the life of me understand what the heck exponents can be used for as a real life example.

I felt super frustrated, looked on Google, asked friends, and nothing was sinking in. I went to take a break and fell asleep straight away. So the takeaway here is that if something seems way harder than it should be, you probably need a break.

Read More...

A time that I elegantly solved a problem:

I was pretty pleased with the roll that I was on for the deBee challenge this week. The challenge was to take a sentence and use JavaScript commands to remove any buzzy words. There was a bit of spelling and case variation in the words: "buzz", "BuZz", "bizz" etc.

I've caught myself not reading the questions properly about three or four times now so this time I looked pretty hard at the question. First, I split the string into individual words, then I made all the words lower case so the buzzing would be easier to filter out. The next hurdle we had to go over was to filter out the word "bizz" as well - as just filtering out "buzz" would leave "bizz".

I considered filtering words that start with "b" but there were other words ("by" and "bees") that would have fallen under that category too. I'd seen the "startsWith()" method before, so I thought I'd see if "endsWith('zz')" would work - and it did! :D

Putting brackets around the instructions in the filter command meant it kept words that did not end in 'zz' and it also put all the words that end in 'zz' into lower case. All the buzzing was gone, and all that was left was to join the string back together. Noice.

Read More...

My confidence levels with the following problem-solving techniques:

Pseudocode:

It isn't my instinct to write Pseudocode but I don't find it too hard, and I find I get more benefits from this when I want to look back on my code.

Trying something:

Trying something definitely works for me, it helps me get on a roll. Just staring at the screen wondering what to do is the #1 cause of me getting stuck.

Rubber ducky method:

I have not tried this one & I don't feel massively confident doing it to be honest.

Reading error messages:

It's not my instinct to do this yet but when I do it is pretty useful.

Console.logging

I have started doing this a bit more frequently and I feel good about it. Console.logging definitely helps me understand what the flip is going on way better.

Googling

I am way more confident googling problems than I was at the start of the week! Now I have successfully Found Answers by googling it doesn’t seem so much like a big jumbly void.

Asking peers for help

Pretty good - but I don't really need to do it that much because I live with someone who has done this course.

Asking coaches for help

I definitely find it easier to ask my facilitator for help when I can semi follow along with things and not when I am completely lost. Lucky I haven't been completely lost that much.

Improving my process with reflection

Reflecting on the above has been usefu for SURE.

Read More...

Return to Homepage