Strategies for Solving Unfamiliar Problems
It feels reasonable to assume that solving unfamiliar problems gets harder with age. Why should we have to ask an old man to learn new tricks? He clearly doesn't have to... but what if he does? When I first got into college, I really thought I knew a lot more of the computer landscape than I did. I thought my experiences with writing computer video games could apply to most other computer problems. I was dead wrong. The lesson was made abruptly noticable in my data structures class where I first felt some self doubt in my abilities. The class was full of what appeared to be rather obvious conclusions around how structuring data could make software programs run more efficiently and consume less space, but the level of difficulty involved with demonstrating, explaining, and repeating results was not so obvious. It was similar to the experience I saw in writing music. To hear an amazing song is easy. To write the song and produce the record is MUCH harder. E...