What's more important: knowing what? or knowing how?

So what did we learn today at Coder Camps? As always, quite a bit!

We worked with multi-dimensional arrays and discussed objects. We went over object literal notation and started a new project to put the new knowledge to use. Oh, and more Coderbyte problems as well. Today one of the problems required (well, I'm sure there are always other ways, but they wouldn't have been pretty) the use of a recursive function call in order to push all the possible combinations of one array of numbers into a new array.

There's a difference between knowing what you need to do something and knowing how to do it. Fortunately, we don't have to program in a vacuum and really, its the former that's the key skill in coding. There will always be new problems, and you'll never memorize every possible method and technique out there - yes, the more you know the faster you can work, but the most important thing is to know how to think through a problem and break it down until you can see what resources you'll need to solve it. Then, finding and applying those resources becomes much easier.

After a day like today (hard but good!) I'd like to say thanks, first and foremost to my paired programing partner - bouncing ideas off each other and catching each other's bugs makes us both better coders and problem solvers.  Also on the "thank you" list - Google, your search algorithms make my life so much easier, and Stackoverflow - you're up there as well.