Lessons from solving a maze
Let’s solve a maze.
Well, that was fun. Took a while though didn’t it? It usually takes me about 30s. There has to be a better way
One interesting thing you may notice is that the larger the maze, the better the bidirectional approach is.
Our natural instinct is to attack every problem from the beginning and keep going until it’s completed. This often works because the problem is small enough, however every so often you run into a bigger problem where stepping back and “looking at the big picture” saves you days or weeks of work.
Learning to attack a problem from many different angles is a skill you’ll learn over time. Here’s a few processes that will help you to improve:
- Splitting knowledge into “Problems” and “Tools”, learning 100 tools is useless with no problem to apply them to and vice versa.
- Learning a low level language (C/Rust) and a high level languages (haskell)
- Pair programming (or any type of paired work)
- Time gated tasks: whenever a task takes more than 1 hour, take a step back and start trying to “solve the maze backwards”.