Hey my friends! Hope everything is going good for you. Else, you’re living real life :)

I have finally managed to find the consistency that i did not have for almost 2 years, for taking the time to write these blog posts. I wanted to write consistently here, writing stuff in a physical dairy or in our blog/website is the best way to open our arguments/thoughts/ideas more clearly. Recently i found that, writing on a paper is the best way (atleast for me) to solve problems.

My current project, XREP took almost 2 months (still on) to complete all features. XREP is a regex generator written all from scratch. You know how it feels like, right? But i enjoyed it a lot and a lot. There were many things learned. If you can take away one thing from this, it should be this; When you are dealing with complex problems, take a pen and paper, solve in it.

During the times that i had to solve problems that felt hard, I used to try different things with the code and yet not do it better. This is said by nobody, but i finally took a pen and paper, started writing by hand and tried to solve it on the paper. Let me tell you that, I’ve solved that particular problem in few hours after a break that else might have taken an entire day.

When there is a problem that needs to be solved and if you feel that is somewhat tricky/complex, take a few minutes/hour break, completely forget about the problem that you’re trying to solve. Yes, you should feel like you’re seeing that particular problem for the first time. Trust me, it helps a lot (more like how clearing cache is). Then start solving the same with đź“ť. I hope now you will at least start to think deeply about it rather than trying one thousand things, staring at the computer screen. I would argue that it should be the way we should solve things.

Have you seen technical/coding questions? especially at big tech companies, for interns. They will give you pen, and paper and you should write the code on it. Firstly, we would give a weird look at everyone’s face. But they are doing it the right way. Because writing code on paper is much harder than writing in computer/editor, because now our brain also should work with writing with pen on paper. Infact there is a quote:

Writing is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is - Dick Guindon.

So, now i hope that you’ll take the time to turn off the computer screen and start doing stuff this way. It’s Sunday! I hope you’re prepared for the week. Just keep up the head and go on!