How To Solve Tough Problems

In: Updates By: Brian Armstrong

1 Apr 2009

Hey folks…no blog updates yet since I’m still busy finishing the new billing feature for UniversityTutor.com. It’s getting pretty crazy…I’ve mostly finished coding up the hand drawn screens that I showed you last week, so I should have a video of them for you soon. They are all ajaxy and look amazing.

I also got approved with a payment processor: www.achdirect.com. This is great news and means I’m getting very close.

Only trouble is that they don’t have a Ruby library (UniversityTutor.com is developed using Ruby on Rails) so I’m having to code this up myself so my site can talk to their payment gateway. I’ll contribute the code to the open source community (as part of the Active Merchant plugin) when it’s done so other people can use it.

Needless to say I am learning about all sorts of programming mumbo jumbo (PCI compliance, SSL encryption, WSDL web services, POST/GET/PUT, etc, etc, etc) and I was reminded that when I hit a tough problem and I’m just not making any progress, here is what I usually do:

do 30 minutes of either exercise, walking, or mindless television
eat something

Then come back and things just seem to start working. Try it next time. It really works. After a certain point, pushing yourself further is a downward spiral. But with 30 minutes to reset – clearing the mental calculator if you will – and some sugar your brain will be a high performing machine once again.

Share and Enjoy:

12 Responses

Créer un site

April 1st, 2009 at 8:19 am

This is why for production product, it always better to use the same as 80% of others projects. With PHP/MySQL, it’s less sexy, but you almost always find the snipset of code you need in 2 clicks.

my 2 cents after 20 years of coding hours

Brian Armstrong

April 1st, 2009 at 11:12 pm

Haha, you’re probably right. Ruby on rails isn’t quite mature yet but it will eventually dominate PHP (it uses MySQL underneath too). It’s much better in some ways…still not easy in others.

Brian Armstrong

April 1st, 2009 at 11:16 pm

Just to give you an example, I was testing out this new service: http://heroku.com

Got this entire app built on online in under 5 minutes: http://barmstrong.heroku.com/
Didn’t write a single line of database code.

This is another famous one where he makes an entire blog application in 15 minutes:
http://media.rubyonrails.org/video/rails_blog_2.mov
Rails is pretty neat.

College Town Menus (CTM)

April 1st, 2009 at 10:07 am

Brian, looking forward to the new updates and videos. I thought you had someone else developing for you? If its you doing it all/mostly, great job! I hate coding – found that out in college and will never go back.

I agree with Créer, mainstream is nice to ensure compatability. For my site, we’re using a framework that seems to be working great right now, hope it maintains well. Kind of wish we went with something a bit more popular. We looked at Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, but decided that custom ontop of a basic framework would work better. We’ll see.

Keep up the great work!

Brian Armstrong

April 1st, 2009 at 11:14 pm

Yep doin it myself for now. What framework are you using? I really love wordpress also.

Samuel McCrohan

April 1st, 2009 at 12:16 pm

Keep at it… There’s always a coding solution one way or another! :)
I concur with taking a break… An invigorating run always refreshes me when I hit a block. :)
Good luck,
Sam

Brian Armstrong

April 1st, 2009 at 11:17 pm

Thanks Sam

Matt Thomas

April 1st, 2009 at 6:23 pm

Question, how come you haven’t hired someone to do the coding for you?

Is coding and programming (and learning this stuff) something you enjoy doing? Are you looking to save money? Or would you just prefer to more intimately understand how your own site is working underneath the hood?

I ask this because I have found that spending time learning some of the very technical aspects of web design can take up a lot of my own time, while I can be doing other things while a specialist can handle this for me.

I’m not questioning the validity of your strategy, I’m just curious as to your reasoning for doing it this way.

Thanks Brian! :)

Brian Armstrong

April 1st, 2009 at 11:21 pm

Good point Matt, I think for me its a combination of saving money and being very picky about what I want. I actually have a masters degree in CS and have been programming since I was probably 16 or so, so for me it’s easier to just do it myself than to explain to someone else. But given infinite amounts of money, it probably wouldn’t hurt to put together a crack team of coders who I can put to work for stuff like this.

I think I am a bit weird to actually enjoy programming (not gonna lie it makes me want to pull my hair out occasionally – but I still consider it a hobby and read up on it constantly for fun). For most people this is probably not the case though and it makes much more sense to outsource it than to spend all day looking for a missing semicolon.

Matt Thomas

April 2nd, 2009 at 9:26 pm

I can definitely understand that, in that I enjoy coding a lot myself. I have often read a lot about how doing technical work is often considered the antithesis to entrepreneurship.

On the other hand, entrepreneurship is all about freeing up your time to allow you to do what you want. So if you actually enjoy coding, then it probably makes sense that you are doing it yourself (entrepreneurially speaking).

Brian Armstrong

April 6th, 2009 at 1:57 pm

Agreed

Don Sabatini

April 25th, 2009 at 6:12 am

Yes, true. Ruby on rails is not just very easy.

Breaking Free

How To Solve Tough Problems

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