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Puzzling it out … again?

boneist June 19, 2009 Uncategorized 0

Just because I happened to have my camera still in my handbag after a recent holiday to Yorkshire, I took the opportunity of taking photos of some of my puzzles.

Here is a toffee tin that I’ve now appropriated to hold the puzzles that are currently out of the drawer:

Here’s the drawer where I keep my puzzles:

And just because, here’s my desk – you can tell I believe in keeping things fun at work, can’t you?!:

And here’s a close up of the left hand side of my desk:

– there’s a book missing from my shelf, namely the “Oracle PL/SQL Programming” bible book by Steven Feuerstein! And I know what you’re thinking – “Wot, no Tom Kyte?!” That’s because I’ve got his book at home *{:-)

Puzzling it out

boneist June 16, 2009 Uncategorized 0

Way back when I first started working in a “proper job” after uni some 10 years ago, I bought a puzzle (similar to this one, except the ball on mine is larger and a light wood in colour), and I couldn’t solve it. In fact, it took 3 months of being passed round the department before anyone solved it! (It was, incidentally, an Oracle developer who was contracting with us at the time who first solved it.)

Since that first puzzle, I have amassed quite a large collection, most of which lives in my drawer at work (I don’t have enough desk space to have all of them out!) whilst I rotate 3 or 4 periodically and leave them on my desk for others to try and solve.

Problem solving is perhaps my strongest skill, and I can see now that you’re beginning to get an inkling of where I’m going with this post! A large part of developing code involves problem solving – what’s the best design for the requirements? What’s the most efficient way of doing X and Y? What’s the cause of this bug that the users are reporting? and so on… I firmly believe that exercising the mind by doing puzzles such as these, Sudoku, crosswords, etc is one way of helping to keep the mind flexible and open to new suggestions and ideas (if nothing else, frustration is good for making you go “Oh, let’s just try this silly random thing I dismissed earlier!” and that can lead to all sorts of breakthroughs.)

Problem solving is not all the job entails, of course; you have to have a large dollop of common sense, not to mention a sense of proportion and reality (is this problem *really* worth solving?) but I maintain that it helps.

And in the meantime, I shall keep adding to my collection, whenever I see a new one…