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Takeaways

Anthony Moore

If, in your heart, you know your time is valuable…

People will recognize that.

People will respect that.

People will treat you differently.

Witty Quotes:

• “Being busy is a form of mental laziness.” -Tim Ferriss

• “The most successful people I know are not busy. They’re focused.” -Jeff Goins

• “People are unhappy in large part because they are confused about what is valuable.” -William Irvine

• “When you have less time available for work, you have to make better choices about what to work on (and what not to).” -Tim Metz

• “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.” -Warren Buffet

• “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”

Richard Reis

How to be a good problem solver:

1. Understand what is being asked
2. Plan your solution
3. Divide the problem into sub-problems
4. Stuck?
   • Debug
   • Reassess
   • Research
5. Practice (Solve problems frequently)

Witty Quotes:

• “Everyone in this country should learn to program a computer, because it teaches you to think.” -Steve Jobs

• “The biggest mistake I see new programmers make is focusing on learning syntax instead of learning how to solve problems.” -V. Anton Spraul

John Sonmez

Steps to solve a programming problem:

70% of your time is spent on 1, 2 and 3 and the last 30% of time is spent on 4, 5 and 6.

1. Read the problem completely twice.
2. Solve the problem manually with 3 sets of sample data.

3. Optimize the manual steps.

4. Write the manual steps as comments or pseudo-code.
5. Replace the comments or pseudo-code with real code. Optimize the real code.
6. Optimize the real code.

Any language you expect to be able to solve algorithm type problems in, you should know how to do the following things:

• Create a list
• Sort a list or array
• Create a map or dictionary
• Loop through a list, or dictionary
• Parse strings
• Convert from string to int, int to string, etc

Discussion Questions

1. What’s the one thing I bring to this career (and a potential employer) that nobody else can?

   I have a history of 13 years in product testing and 3 in game development, because of which I have a refined sense of discovering, researching and communicating problems as well as creating documentation that describes both normal and technical versions of these problems. I’ve worked on literally dozens of AAA game titles and have gone through the versioning process nearly 1000 times over my career. I’ve worked with multiple companies participated in eaches approach to developing software. Having this background coupled with a passion for solving problems sets me appart from the crowd and gives me a resilence to illusive issues and hard to solve problems that many do not have.

2. What are 3 things I’ll start doing to “un-stick” myself whenever I get stuck on tough piece of code, logic, or feature?

   • Employ the 5 why’s technique moving quickly from one “why” to the next to keep from jumping to any conclusions.

   • Go back to the whiteboard.

   • Use the 6 steps described by John Sonmez

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