This last week, there has been a lot of being blocked, but I'm not sure I would describe any of the problems as 'simple'.
But I can feel that there's still progress, even if incrementally small, and that's what keeps everything exciting.
Recently, while working on the Built-In Methods Kata, I found myself stuck when trying to capitalise the words in a sentence string.
I seemed to be coming across the same response from my brain whenever I approached something that seemed a bit complex. I could tell I knew how to do 1-2 of the steps, and then maybe even the last step, but then my brain would put up this grey wall anytime I tried to approach the middle.
It was like it was throwing it's little brain hands up and saying "haven't I done enough!"
It's a pesky little auto-response and can often get in the way as it searches for any sort of dopamine hit from literally ANYTHING else.
But, together we're in training.
So I let myself do some Googling. Maybe someone has asked my question before, in exactly the way I need answered. There were a few pages, but all with different solutions, and none that fitted what I wanted to do, or that seemed to translate to me.
I tried pseudocoding - something that was surprised at for being way more challenging than it looks. I'm telling myself what the steps are, when I don't know what they are. It's sort of like drawing yourself a map of somewhere you've never been before. Except you don't know which city you're in or what the terrain is like. You only know of a couple of landmarks and your destination.
My pseudocode looked clumsy and unclear. It gave me a little direction or even just something specific to return my focus to when I felt lost.
Then I gave myself a break. Watched a Friends episode. I think this helped a lot.
When I returned to the task, I felt much more confident about tackling it. There HAS to be a simple and logical solution.
I talked my way through it. The rubber ducky method. Except I am the rubber duck. When I'm explaining something to myself, I feel like I'm actually teaching myself at the same time. An authoritative yet kind voice, talks me through what I'm trying to achieve at each step and checks that the code corresponds. This is where my pseudocoding came in handy and I was able to rewrite parts of it. And then once I reached the method that I needed to research, I knew exactly what I was looking for, and where the answer would slot into my code.
Again, elegance isn't a word I'd use to describe my work at the moment. But there have certainly been times, where I have surprised myself with the flow in which I've completed a task.
Maybe this speaks more to my self-perception but I'm usually looking at these challenges and thinking "I have no idea but let's take a deep breath and jump."
So then when the landing is super cushiony and I open my eyes and I've already arrived, pain-free - it's a moment of joy! I know I haven't accomplished anything groundbreaking but small wins can feel just as good as the big ones.
I felt this way when working through the Gradebook Kata. I had moments where I had to stop and look up how to do simple things (I even forgot once, how to write a function), but for other parts, I typed what seemed logical, putting all the pieces together with the syntax.
It made sense to me, and lo and behold it also made sense to the test! These are the moments that reinforced to me that, although I wasn't able to do any of the stretch exercises, and I still felt shaky, some things were sticking in the ol' noggin. Probably hanging on for dear life, but sticking for now anyway.