Stuck on a Programming Problem? Just Quit.

There comes a time in every developer’s existence when they find themselves stuck on a programming problem.  We’ve all been there:  blood-shot eyes, pulsing veins in our foreheads, and synapses dying at a rate unheard-of since that Robitussin dare you took your senior year of college.

In that moment when Stack Overflow and your own brain have completely let you down, what do you do?

You quit, that’s what.

That’s right: quit. If you’ve already beat your head against a wall for several hours, doing it more eventually stops being productive.

Get up. Step away from the screen. Do something else. Play a video game. Go for a walk. Work on another project. Write something. Build something. Make something. Cook something. Have a conversation. Write some perfectly useless code in a different programming language. 

Whatever you do, do something that shifts your mindset. It might take an hour. It might take a day.  It might take a week. But returning to a project with fresh eyes can make all the difference.

So next time you find yourself staring at the same lines of code a little to long, remember: be a quitter! (Just not, like, permanently. That’s just sad.)