Thinking like a programmer

A few things that Richard has mentioned to me have shifted my perspective on what it is to be a programmer.

Before chatting to him I did think of programming as wizardry, but something he mentioned has showed me that it's actually just someone with the ability to take a problem and break it down into a very precise and specific set of instructions.

This led me to this talk which I really enjoyed and got a lot out of:

I think this is the key to unlocking my brain and finding a new way of approaching problem statements in programming.

I'm about 3 weeks in at the point of writing this and still struggling hugely with this.

I need to change my thinking into a way that can logically break down a problem into smaller steps and then tie them up into a working result. I find myself staring at code for too long without knowing if there are different paths at the moment.

It feels like when I approach a problem I do not no enough about the tools to know which one to pick up and which one to avoid. I'm not sure which tool is most useful to get the job done. Or I might know the overall tool like "I need a loop" but when it comes to what operations to do within that loop I'm stuck.