The raging bull strategy

The behavior I see most frequently in young developers is what one of them described to me as the “raging bull strategy”. I loved the name. It means “just keep trying random things until it works.”

I’ve seem some developers here facing their problems this same way. Dealing with a task that was not trivial but was not terribly hard, they did not plan much and just started implementing. And they get something wrong and spent a lot of time trying to fix with many “let me see if this works".

Of course, this almost always fails.

The biggest sin you can make while developing is not have a clear idea of what you need to do (this is also the biggest sin of projects: not having a clear specification). I once saw someone struggle for hours with a non trivial but classic algorithm. When I stopped him and asked him to explain the algorithm to me, it forced him to understand it. In five minutes he was finished.

Staring into a screen may seem non productive, but it is not. Read about the algorithm or library you are using, think about the implementation, ponder everything. Only then you should start typing.