The better question would be when didn't I get stuck. I actually thought I nailed the ‘deBee’ challenge really quickly, but I missed the fact that the words that needed to be taken out were a mixture of capitalised and lowercase letters. Even though everything else I had done was correct, I hadn’t taken this into account. After doing a little bit of research and coming up with a couple of theories, I found that the easiest way was to just convert the words to all become lowercase myself, and then remove the words from there.
To get to this solution I used a mixture of:
Trying SomethingI didn’t get too frustrated in this situation, but it did strike me as an interesting problem which helped me get through it with a level head. And I learnt that even though I’m always told to think simple, I need to think even more simple. Sometimes the answer is just as easy as you might think.
The capitalise challenge gave me a chance for this. I found a function called ‘substring()’ and it basically was able to tidy up a huge mess (that to be honest didn’t even get to a working stage). It allowed me to make changes to any word starting from a certain letter position. In this case, it made capitalising the first letter of each word very easy, and then changing the rest of the word from the second letter in it onwards back to lowercase.
To find this handy tool I ended up using:
Trying SomethingDuring solving this I felt pretty on edge and confused about a lot, not realising these certain functions existed made my life a lot easier. And it helped me learn to keep exploring new options even if you have one that works. A lot of the time the work can be done a lot quicker and easier.
I haven’t really dabbled in practicing a lot of pseudocode as much as I should have, but I have no doubt that I will be using it a lot more in the future. I'm still getting used to the idea of it.
This is something I’m pretty familiar with. I do sometimes find it hard to find a place to start when trying different things, but once the ball starts rolling I can get into the rhythm of things a bit better.
I love the rubber ducky method. For me, explaining something to others is a really helpful way of showing my understanding of a problem. If I can’t explain something properly then I immediately know that I need to look more into it, or ask for help.
I use this quite a bit. I mean when you have a message telling you exactly what the error is, it’s best not to ignore it. It can easily help save time by pointing you in the right direction.
I’m quite a visual worker so console.logging is by far one of the most helpful problem-solving techniques there is for me. I can see a result straight away and check if everything is working the way I want it to.
I’d say without Google I probably wouldn’t be able to do this course. I use it every day looking for help, so I’d say my confidence with using it is pretty high.
I have no issue asking my peers for help, I actually reached out once for a problem I had, but before I got an answer I actually fixed the problem myself (and such a simple one as well).
I’ve reached out to my coach a few times. I’d love to be able to sit down and work on a problem myself until I get it right, but sometimes I get to a point where it becomes the issues of spending hours trying to work it out, or taking ten minutes to talk to somebody about it. My coach does a really good job of helping in a way that it’s still me finding the solution, they just gently push me in the right direction.
Reflection has actually been pretty difficult for me. It’s just as new as everything else has been in this course so far so I’m still getting the hang of it. I’m not sure how much it has helped in terms of my problem-solving, but I think it has helped a little overall.