Ask HN: What has made you a better problem solver in software engineering?

Are there any resources you recommend? Or do personal projects give you enough problems? And how do you map solving these problems to patterns you can use in a future problem you’ll face?

There are a ton of stuff to write about this but so little time so I'll try to just give one thing that helped a lot (small effort, large payoff)

Be explicit with what phase of your "thinking" you're in. When faced with a problem, focus on giving lateral/divergent ideas and come up with a multitude of different solutions. Don't spend time thinking why/why not a solution is good, just note the solution itself and move on to finding another one.

Once this is done, start the next phase which is the convergent thinking. Sit down with all the different solutions and start compare the tradeofs between them. Eventually you'll reach either some middle ground of some solutions, or just one solution.

Doing this when collaborating with other engineers is also super helpful, as people won't feel like their ideas are being shut down as soon as they utter them, so more people can part of the whole process (if needed)

Working on real world problems without seeking help from Google/StackOverflow, even if it means reinventing the wheel to make it fit for your particular problem, or even going through pages of documentation/code to find the purpose of a single function. It may sound like a waste of useful time, but it slowly makes you self-sufficient to deal with any kind of issues later on.

Getting away from the computer.

Ask and agree on the "why" behind requirements, then the what or how to realize it becomes more easily negotiable.

I’ll tell you what absolutely didn’t help: worthless whiteboard interview questions or brain teaser coding puzzles.