You’re Toolset matters

This week I’ve been solving different problems at HackerRank and I realized that you’re best possible solution is based on the knowledge and experience that you had at the time you are solving it, let’s think about logging if you only have just an “axe” you’re gonna get the job done but it’s going to cost more effort and time rather than having a chainsaw, so you need to put more effort to acquire that new tool, to be able to use it later If you encounter the same problem or even a different one that needs something similar.

You must have a good base of data structures and algorithms to improve your solutions and then have a deep knowledge of the framework or language that you are using, but you need to fail and then practice to grow. There’s an example right below before looking more into kolin and the solution after learning something new.

Before / After

This week was more about relearning a lot of things and acquiring a deep knowledge about kotlin specialy with scoped functions and Kotlin collections functions but to be more clear fail over and over again with time outs and some errors because I need to identify all the possible cases on each problem before coding something.

Thinking out loud

One of the hardest things to do is trying to explain something that involves a logical process to someone else, maybe in your mind it’s crystal clear but sometimes is more blurry than you think, so I try to explain some of the easy problems to a person that doesn’t know anything about programming, when you achieve to let the solution clear to the other person you’re making some progress it’s a really good practice also having pair with someone else it’s really helpful because even when the problem is the same, all minds works so different and you “obtain new tools”.

So keep failing, keep learning and keep practicing.