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  • It's extremely important to have a compiler set up so that you can quickly compile your code and see what happens. You should NOT try to figure out how to create the program without ever running your code. This held me up for literally 10 months with the USACO puzzles: I was having trouble learning all the C / C++ code necessary to do certain things so that I could create an entire program and hand it to the USACO website to compile, when I should have just been typing stuff up, handing it to my own compiler, and seeing what happened. I should have been starting with the most simple part of the puzzle and incrementally getting more complicated, just like that Stanford professor recommended in his Python class at Google.




Quora - How do programmers code quickly?
http://www.quora.com/How-do-programmers-code-quickly?share=1

Quote:
Jesse Farmer:
- They know how to use their keyboards to do work. Keyboards are way faster than mice once you know how to use them. They're also more amenable to muscle memory. Are you clicking around to open new files? When I'm coding I barely touch my mouse.
- They are good typists. I probably type around 80 WPM on average and 100-120 WPM if I'm focusing on my typing, for example. Go practice! I like http://play.typeracer.com/ and https://typing.io/.
- They know how to use their tools, especially on the command-line. Ctrl+R for reverse search, Ctrl+A/E for beginning/end of lines, <Tab> for autocompleting filenames, etc. These become muscle memory after a point.
- They are very good at debugging and are likely to isolate, identify, and resolve a bug 100x quicker than a beginner. This isn't just because they "know more." Oftentimes they know just as much as you, but have a more disciplined approach to finding the source of unexpected problems.
- They have a better sense of where to look for information and aren't afraid to navigate through manpages or even source code to understand how some other system is behaving. If I'm having trouble with a poorly-documented Ruby gem, for example, I'll often look at the gem's source code to see if I can make sense of what's going wrong. I'd say 90% of the time this is quicker than Google.

Regarding debugging, I wrote a blog post (Teaching Novice Programmers How to Debug Their Code) that outlines how to teach people to be better debuggers.
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