[acesubido]

1. Reading helps. I find that reading the "manual" of a tech stack helps even more. Reading it slowly brings the best results, and if all else fails, reading the source. Under time pressure, my previous tendencies were to "Stack Overflow" and keep pasting stuff until it works. For simpler problems that worked, but for complex problems it didn't. Reading has helped a lot.

2. You can solve lots of problems and it might help. Over the course of time, my problem-solving skills improved slightly by the amount of problems I was solving. My problem-solving skills improved a lot just by polishing my problem-solving method. At the start of anything I take 15-30 minutes to write down the tasks I need to do and coordinate with others to check if it's the right set of things. I write, down to the classes, that I think I need to work on. For debugging, it's polishing the red-green-refactor cycle, for harder bugs I write the actual layers I need to peel (os/db/language version? database layer all good? weird logs? check disk? check I/O? network? skim through mailing lists? iperf? database? etc.).