Blocked by a Simple Problem
While working on my Dev Academy work I got blocked during one of the previous sprints due to a bug in an interactive coding lesson. When I realised my solution to a challenge wasn't registered as being correct, even though it appeared to be, the first thing I did was try to tinker with my code or try a different way of achieving the same effect (making text red using CSS). I wasn't able to get it work after trying for a few minutes, so then I jumped into the dev academy discord and searched for "red text stuck" and almost immediately found someone else with the a very similar issue. Unfortunately it wasn't exactly the same, but it seemed similar enough that I tried using a different browser and ended up overcoming the issue :)
Elegantly Solved a Problem
I needed to get flights booked for my travel to NZ but was feeling anxious about it and was worried I'd get distracted - I was also feeling quite socially isolated and really wanted to spend some time with a friend. I had a think about it and tried to think about how I might be able to kill two birds with one stone. So I asked me friend if they had any plans later in the afternoon and if they were able to give me a hand booking my flights because I was extremely overwhelmed, they said yes and they'd love to help and hang for a bit and we got them booked that night! I'm going to try to keep seeking out opportunities to not necessarily "multi-task" perse, but more so try to combine two problems into one more fun solution that ticks multiple boxes, as I practice with this I'm getting better at it. The main challenge at the moment is relearning/understanding the problem space involved with a lot of my challenges and how I can help myself, a lot of things that were once simple for me are confusing with my memory issues and brain fog, but I'm getting through it bit-by-bit, I'm miles ahead of where I was this same time last months, and I'm making good progress and I feel good about myself :)
Confidence with Problem Solving Techniques
I think I'm great with pseudocode and experimentation to solve problems, and I tend to be quite good at interpreting error messages, searching online (both search engines and also sites like reddit or niche forums) and using console.logs to debug. I've been aware of rubber duck debugging for a while, but I haven't done it much, so it's certainly an area for growth. I have quite a long path ahead of me with regards to asking my peers or coaches for help and I find it very, very challenging because I worry about feeling like I'm wasting other people's time - I've also not go a lot of experiencing asking people for help, which compounds the issue because then it feels into having a complex about inexperience in a given category of social interaction which doesn't tend to come to me naturally as someone on the spectrum. I think I implicitly do process reflection, but I don't think I've ever really done it in an explicit manner, I think - I'm excited to try to give it more of a shot and see how I can apply to it reflecting in an internal sense but also seeing where I can generalize it out to. I think I'm good at 'reflecting' in a sense on other people's processes, but struggle or perhaps just don't even think to try doing it to/for my own processes