For #8 especially - this is a lot of how I write, not so much program (yet), but it's the same thing. I grab a person and say "I need to talk about a thing, if you can ask me questions that's rad but mostly I need to talk" and halfway through explaining myself I have solved my problem. (My primary beta reader asks me great questions too when I text her inane divorced snippets like "so X came to Y because his aunt made him" and then she goes "Okay, but why not Z or A?" not because she disagrees, but because she wants to know what *I* know about it.)
Learning how to look at problems, how to ask questions, is huge. I do this a lot at work - we're doing a lot of corner case programming so I have taken it upon myself as a PERSONAL CHALLENGE to COME UP WITH THE WEIRDEST CORNER CASES because my hand to God the one we don't think of will be the one that's highest priority two days after we deploy. And in some ways, it's incredibly useful that I have a non-technical background (and that I'm a writer): I always ask myself what would make the weirdest story, and it turns out no one thought of that before, but usually agrees we need to account for it.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2016-06-29 03:24 am (UTC)Learning how to look at problems, how to ask questions, is huge. I do this a lot at work - we're doing a lot of corner case programming so I have taken it upon myself as a PERSONAL CHALLENGE to COME UP WITH THE WEIRDEST CORNER CASES because my hand to God the one we don't think of will be the one that's highest priority two days after we deploy. And in some ways, it's incredibly useful that I have a non-technical background (and that I'm a writer): I always ask myself what would make the weirdest story, and it turns out no one thought of that before, but usually agrees we need to account for it.