Several weeks ago, I was working on reports for ReceiptWallet and thought I had it all done in one weekend. The following Monday I realized I missed a part, handling sub items. I poked at it a few times and got nowhere. I then thought about the problem for 3 days and figured it out (all without coding). I told my wife that it would take me 1 hour to finish it. So the following Saturday, I got up, coded for 1 hour (exactly) and said that I was done. I went to test it and it didn’t work. Damn. I had breakfast, thought a little more about the problem, came back, added one line of code and then everything worked.

While it is obvious to think first, I’m not sure a lot of developers do that to solve complex problems. For me, these types of problems are all consuming and I must solve them before I can move on. Luckily no one complex problem seems all that difficult to me; I may not want to code it, but that’s another story. Not wanting to code something has more to do with tediousness than complexity.

Long story short, think first.