How to Develop Problem Solving Skills in Programming

Problem solving skills are essential for those who want to pursue a programming career. All great developers are also great problem solvers too. You need to work on your problem solving skills early in your career if you want to become successful.

However, before honing your problem solving skills, you have to understand the procedure of problem solving, which involves the following four steps:

• Examine the problem from various angles and understand it thoroughly.
• Devise a strategy that may solve the problem.
• Implement your solution.
• Verify that your solution indeed has the desired result.

While developing a strategy that may solve your problem, you have to research existing solutions and adapt them to your current situation. During the research phase, you have to weigh the pros and cons of each existing solution using a variety of online resources like Quora, StackOverflow, and others. During the adapt phase, you have to check if one of the pre-existing solutions you have found can serve as a solution to your problem.

And what if none of the pre-existing solutions can be applied to your problem? In this case, you have to become creative and come up with a brand new solution that nobody has found before.

Now, let us have a look at some ways to improve problem solving skills in programming:

Master Any One Programming Language

Instead of becoming a jack of all trades and master of none, choose only one programming language and become a master of it. At the same time, choose a programming language with a large network that enables you to identify solutions to your problems quickly.

Also, you must understand that programming languages with smaller networks are also important and you need to know them. But when you get started with your programming career, your focus should be on becoming a master of any one programming language.

Understanding the basics of any programming language is a must when you are getting started with coding. When you are learning the language, complete minor projects on your own so that you can hone your analytical and practical skills. This enables you to test your abilities to understand the programming language faster.

Interact with Other Programmers

While working on your problem solving skills, you can participate in quizzes, contests, and online discussions. When you show interest in coding tests online, you will acquire more knowledge. Also, you will meet other programmers who can help you to learn more. Look for online sources that allow you to practice difficulties, tests, and questions. Plenty of them are available online, and you will find most of them to be exciting and fascinating. We have mentioned a list at the end of this article.

Join a community of programmers. If you are a beginner, you may find them to be advanced, but you will soon catch up with them. These platforms are great to improve your knowledge although you may find it difficult to understand what they are talking about initially.

Discuss Problems and Solutions

When you are a programmer, your problem need never be yours alone. If you are facing difficulties with something, feel free to share it with your online community. Similarly, if you come up with an innovative solution to an existing problem, share it with the community and see what they think about it.

Sharing issues with the online programmer community is a great idea as one of the community members might have faced a similar issue in the past and come up with a solution that you have never heard of.

Work on Your Creativity and Self-confidence

Many developers focus heavily on adapting existing solutions to current problems. A better alternative is to come up with a solution of one’s own.

Beginners are reluctant to come up with original solutions because they don’t have the required self-confidence. They think that their solutions are no good just because they are beginners. Also, some beginners churn out new solutions quickly and feel that they are the best. Such lack of self-confidence as well as overconfidence is because of an inability to view the solution subjectively.

The trick is to study solutions objectively by implementing and verifying them. However, doing this for each solution is a time-consuming and expensive procedure. A better way would be to create spikes and analyse their performance. Spikes are implementation of simplified versions of the solutions to weigh their pros and cons.

Solve Problems Out of the Workplace

Avoid sticking only to problems at the workplace. Instead, think of becoming part of open source projects and give them your valuable contributions. This allows you to learn from other programmers and gain exposure to problems you never knew existed.

Alternatively, you can create a personal project in collaboration with a few friends or colleagues so that all of you can improve together. Build new apps and open your source code to other programmers. Use their comments, suggestions, and feedback to improve your coding as well as problem solving skills.

Online Resources of Improve Problem Solving Skills in Programming

Join the Kattis Problem Archive to improve your problem solving skills. This online resource includes several programming problems from a variety of sources including competitive programming contents held worldwide. However, the lack of discussion forums and official solutions at the Kattis Problem Archive can be frustrating. If you are looking for such features, join sites like LeetCode or HackerRank.

Or join a site like GeeksforGeeks to learn more about algorithms and data structures. This online resource provides snippets of code in a variety of programming languages, which you are free to use in your IDE.

Whenever you want to improve your knowledge about anything related to a problem, you can try Google. This trusted search engine will lead to sites like GeeksforGeeks, YouTube, LeetCode, HackerRank, and many others. HackerRank, for example, includes an entire section for data structures, which you can filter according to types like trees, heaps, linked lists, arrays, and others.

Our Final Words

Good problem solvers don’t come up with innovative ideas all the time. Instead, they make use of simple and well-defined tools to think about various solutions. All it requires is practice and dedication.

There is no shortcut to success. If you want to hone your problem solving skills so that you can become a better programmer, you have to plunge headlong into it. You have to start writing, debugging, and reading code to figure out your weakness and identify ways to improve. All this is hard work, but the fruits are very sweet. As the days pass, you will notice that your problem solving skills have improved considerably.