[cursork]

Absolutely this. When facing a tough problem it’s a great tactic to write out what you’re trying to solve and how you plan to solve it in prose-style English.

I’ve done it often without ever sharing my writings with anyone at all, and always felt that the code turned out relatively good as a result.

I’d also add that a very prototype that you throw away also helps line up your thoughts.

The key is having something reasonably concrete in front of you that forces you to think of the invariants, compromises, etc in the system. Before making all those decisions concrete by writing loads of code