How I solve a problem

| bootcamp   learning

Being part German I was taught to be efficient and punctual in my life including - or rather - especially at my work. Proper planning is essential in my view but only if you know what you are actually doing. As someone who also enjoys doing creativ things such as writing I know that there are things you cannot plan for.

Cue the first day of our Drupal Bootcamp where we were asked to do the Marshmallow Challenge where you get 18 minutes to build the tallest, free-standing tower of spaghetti with a marshmallow topper you can. Our team won because we got right into it and prototyped and iterated as things went haywire whilst the others sat around discussing plans (and spying on us :) ). We were done minutes before the deadline and whilst the others topped the last second (and toppled) we sat back and won with our tiny, but sturdy construct.

spaghetti tower
Our winning tower

So how do I solve a dev problem?

Not with spaghetti and tape but the approach is the same, only I had no knowledge of structural engineering so diving straight in was OK. With development the process is a bit more refined:

  1. Figure out the elments/tasks that needs to be done and the most sensible order they should be done in. Work on them and when you hit a wall:

  2. Try and figure it out with existing knowledge.

  3. Read up on it (documentation etc.)

  4. Look for the actual solution. Use operators when generic search terms fail. Knowing how to Google is sometimes half the battle.

  5. Ask for help.

Google (and through it Stackoverflow) has gotten me through everything so far. But then I’ve only dealt with very basic problems.