Project 702 ~ Problem Solving and Facing Difficulties

It never occured to me that problem solving was a skill, and it wasn’t up until recent that I have come to understand that it falls under conceptual skills. I learned during my studies at Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology that problem solving is in fact the only skill required to be in the IT industry. By my definition or perception all one really needs to know in order to be a good problem solver is how to structure a web search on duckduckgo. Perhaps this is the single difference between the early adopters/early majority and late majority/laggards. I exorcise my problem solving skills everyday, even if its not to do with programming. The majority of obvious problem solving examples may come from programming since if the program doesn’t work, it won’t work until the problem is solved. The less obvious problem solving examples can be anything from figuring out how to get from my house to school, or what ingredient to substitute for one that I am missing when making a meal. If you think of what you did today I am sure you could identify at least 10 times which you had to problem solve.

Whats hard is when you get to a point where you hit what my first year tutor described as the wall. At some point everyone hits it and I would say you can tell a lot from a person by how they scale that wall. I’ve hit the wall plenty of times, some times I bounce back instantly; other times I needed the help of others. With programming I would say this is a constant, although the other to which I refer to is the internet (9 times out of 10 Stackoverflow). There are times when even the internet doesn’t help, which is when I would inquire the help of those I learn most from (mainly Krupesh and Sam).

I hit a couple walls with the custom module during the course of the project. The first being getting the application menu to be visible. The problem ended up being simply because of permissions; easy enough. The next wall that I hit was getting the extra fields I had added to a view to be visible. This problem took a bit more time and research, and ended up going with studio (a cms like development app) as a solution. This worked for adding fields, but the problem that I found with studio was the generated code was I had no resources to draw from in order to make changes to the raw studio code without causing errors.