Today, I’m going to tell you about a really important concept that I think is going to help you in your career: the idea of learning to solve problems. So many developers focus on the syntax, the language, and learning to “code” or to program, but not on solving problems. I can tell you why that’s so important in a second here.
The Real Emphasis for New Developers
A lot of new developers, even a lot of senior developers, don’t understand what you need to do as a software developer: learn to solve problems, not just to code. I think there is a real emphasis, especially for people who are starting to learn programming and want to get into this field, to learn about the structure of the programming language and all the syntax of it, and to focus on that as being the important thing to learn. That’s really not the critical skill because, as a software developer, you are not going to—I mean, it is important to know the language that you’re using—but the more important skill that you’re going to be required to utilize, and that is more difficult to learn, is the actual ability to solve problems, break them down, and then translate them to code, right?
You have to know both, but if you could only develop one skill as a software developer, I would actually teach you to not even know any syntax of any programming language, just pseudo-code, and just teach you how to take problems and break them down into the smallest components and pieces.
The Critical Skill of Problem Solving
Ultimately, this is what determines whether or not you’re a good software developer, right? As a software developer becomes good at their craft and is able to really excel, their ability really is not knowing programming languages or frameworks. Those are all useful, but it’s not that ability. It’s the ability to take what is a problem, break it down into small pieces that can be understood and organized well, and break those pieces down into smaller subsystems and components until that problem is broken down to the point of a single line of code, or even within that, the actual operations that make up that line of code.
That’s what a really skilled software developer can do. They can see this big problem and break it down logically, and you keep on refining, refining, refining until you get to a single line of code. When you have that ability, it becomes really easy to write code.
The Simplicity of Translation
Why? Because at the point that you’ve broken it down that far, it’s just a simple translation. It’s just a simple translation from, “I want this thing, this code that I know how to do,” and you don’t even need to know the programming language to do that, right? You could literally have the ability to break problems down to the smallest atomic detail, and then you could literally go and look up the syntax and figure out how to write that line of code in that programming language.
In fact, I’ve done that many times. I have written code in a programming language that I knew nothing about, and the way that I was able to do that was by refining the skill of learning to break down problems.
Resources for Learning Problem Solving
I have a resource that I’m going to point to: Algocademy.com. Algocademy offers a range of courses and tutorials focused on problem-solving and algorithmic thinking. These resources guide you through the process of breaking down complex problems and approaching them methodically. You can check out their courses to enhance your skills in a structured way. Another good book is “Cracking the Coding Interview.” Although I feel like the interactive nature of courses like those on Algocademy will be more beneficial, these resources are what I’d recommend.
The point of this article is just to make you aware of the idea that, especially as you’re starting out as a beginner, or even if you’re somewhat of an advanced programmer but you’re struggling, like you don’t feel competent, you don’t feel like you can always solve problems and write code, you feel like you could fix some bugs, you feel like you kind of get it, but you don’t understand how these guys are able to, like, how would I build an entire app by myself? These are questions I used to ask myself.
The Key to Building Applications
How would I create an entire web application? I could work on a piece of this, but I couldn’t design and create the whole thing. The biggest thing is that everything is a problem, right? If you can learn that skill of breaking down problems and translating them, and if you can focus on that, you’re going to get a lot further in your career, where so many people are focused on the language.
The Evolution of Programming Skills
Things have changed a lot over the years. I believe, probably 20 years ago or so, even when I was first starting out and learning programming, understanding the language and its syntax was way more important than it is now because you didn’t have as many resources, and you didn’t have as many libraries. What you were doing was solving problems within the language, and knowing the ins and outs of the language was critical.
Now, as a developer, it’s all a mash-up of different technologies. Everything is changing out from underneath you, so you have to focus on actually learning how to break down problems and then translating that ability to whatever language or domain it is. You’re going to find that it’s all the same. It’s all the same once you have that skill set. That’s the reason why you can know one programming language, and if you’ve got the skill to break down problems, you could go, literally, to a company that programs in a totally different language—and I’ve done this before, I’ve gotten jobs like this—and within a matter of weeks, be able to program in that language at pretty close to just as high a level as someone who’s been doing it for a long time because the critical skill is that ability to break down problems.