Scaffold Your Solution
One of the keys to working efficiently is to manage cognitive load - the amount of information your brain handles at any given moment. We find there are two very important rules that will help you keep a clear head:
- Use cognitive tools like clear code, good habits, useful diagrams, careful planning, and isolation techniques to lighten the load on your working memory.
- Don't work on anything you can't hold in your head all at once.
- If you find there's too much going to keep straight, you probably did a bad job with # 1.
Building a scaffold for your solution before attempting to pass any tests will go a long way towards lightening your mental workload. A well-designed scaffold will:
- Promote breaking down large challenges into smaller ones
- Isolate independent elements of your solution
- Guarantee your solution has the right structure
- Defend against certain types of logic bugs
- Enable you to break up your work time without losing track of where you are
- Writing readable solutions
- Encourage good design habits by committing to them ahead of time
- Prepare you for TDD
Designing your scaffolding is tricky, it will require time and experience before you can expect to do it quickly. Here are a few suggestions to get you started:
- Develop your scaffolding in a Gist, adding a new file for each iteration.
- Begin by naming your function, writing in all arguments, declaring an empty return value, and returning the empty value.
- Build your scaffolding in small steps, converting your solution pseudocode into real code whenever you can.
- Your scaffolding will consist largely of control flow (ie. loops, conditionals, and short procedures)
- Stop each time you have isolated the lines of code that will implement a test category. Put in a comment indicating what logic goes there for later on.
