The most important job a software developer has is solving problems. A job that does not pose challenges is non-productive or at least plain boring. It is easy however to get trapped in the routine of everyday maintenance tasks which require patience more than innovation and it can have a negative effect on the sharpness of your problem solving blade. So how can you stay sharp and fit for the problems to come? As it turns out there are quite a few ways!

Stay in touch with the basics

Try to skim through basic concepts in computer science once in a while. Stacks, queues, different kinds of trees and other data structures are building blocks of every serious software system and they are also fun things to work with. Wikipedia is a great source to refresh your memory on these topics. Data structures are of no value without algorithms though. Never let your knowledge of algorithms get rusty. Remember. Good programmers, know their algorithms!

Work Out!

A good way to kill some time is to solve programming challenges. You don’t need to find a new solution for a NP-hard problem. Just try your hand at something very simple. Like rotating a matrix, or reversing a string. These problems help you remember the basic operations you will need in your everyday tasks.

Recently I stumbled upon HackerRank. It is a great place to challenge yourself and then compare yourself with other fellow programmers! If you feel more confident you can also try to help other people in their computer science problems in Computational Science section of Stack Exchange.

Read, Read and then Read some more!

There are great books in computer science that you’ll enjoy reading. I personally take great pleasure reading Introduction to Algorithms. It covers various topics in CS. I like the unique way the topics are organized in this book. If you don’t like the mathematics, you can safely skip those parts and enjoy the rest. I like this book so much that I have created a GitHub repository called CormenAlgorithms dedicated to implementing all algorithms in this book in C#. You are welcome to join if you feel like it.

Let me know what you think

If you know other ways to stay a good problem solver, please share it so we all can use.