In application development, many of the problems we face are either our own invention or the invention of the idiot we inherited that screwed up code base from. Resolving a problem most often comes down to finding the source . Often, once we find where it's happening, mere competence is what is needed to solve it.
To that end:
- Learn your platform.
- Learn your tools.
- Learn what tools are available for your platform that you haven't encountered yet.
All the brain training in the world is useless without information for the brain to use. In order to solve a problem, you must know what the possibilities are first! Even then, it's a lot quicker to work with good information rather than just a description of the problem.
I might speculate til the cows come home on why something is taking too long to execute. But if I say "lets get some data first", I might see that a whole lot of exceptions are being thrown and realize I could change this to an if statement instead. Without knowing how to collect the information, knowing that on my platform exceptions take quite a bit of overhead, and that there's a way to check before try that is faster, I'd never solve the problem.