Reflective Essay On Problem Solving

Some time last year in November I started to solve hackerrank problems at my pace and here is my progress after about 108 days ago.

Funnily, I used to think there was no need to practice interview questions unless you were looking for a job. After solving so many questions over the months, I slowly realized that my earlier perception was wrong. I now advocate solving a few questions every week to keep skills sharp. It is amazing how fast problem-solving and modelling skills atrophy if not honed.

Here are a few reasons to consider spending a few hours every week solving problems.

1. Improved Problem solving
My problem modelling and solving skills have grown sharper. Just like chess masters can see two or three moves ahead, I now have a similar feeling when I start new problems. I can sometimes 'feel ' an approach is going to fail because I have made the same mistake before.

Practice makes perfect or once burnt, twice shy?

2. Deeper understanding of languages and tools
I think I know a lot of JavaScript but knowing or reading about some effect is not the same as experiencing it first hand. Solving the challenges quickly exposed me to the painful reality of JavaScript 's limits.

For example, I remember reading somewhere a long time ago that JavaScript functions have an arity limit (a function 's arity is the maximum amount of parameters it can accept). This value varies from platform to platform (for my Chrome on Ubuntu, it 's 2^16).

I soon experienced this first