Jim Panttaja

The next technique is characterized in Douglas Hofstadter’s book: Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies. He describes enjoying doing the game Jumble where you take a set of letters and try to make a word out of them. Sometimes the words just appear, sometimes he uses specific techniques (try the ‘u’ after the ‘q’), and other times he writes the letters out in a random order. The goal is to get yourself out of a mental rut.

When you are debugging code - or dealing with a production down situation, it is certainly useful to consider the obvious things (the last module you touched for instance). But sometimes you have to upset the apple cart - and consider something ‘unexpected’. Or introduce some randomness to try to find a pattern.