Ask HN: Where did you find problems to solve?
I usually write stuff down and see what is the most pressing and frequent for a certain period of time once and a while
I use vim as my IDE which automatically highlights the word "TODO" in bright colours when it is in a comment.
So I leave // TODO comments in various parts of our codebase that need attention later down the line - and I also append one or more asterisk symbols depending on how urgent it is, like so:
// TODO ** Refactor abc to do xyz.
Then from the Linux CLI I can "grep -R TODO *" in the codebase's top level directory to get a full list of items on my TODO list, and depending on the number of asterisks before each comment description, I know which item I need to prioritise.
Hope that helps!
My current philosophy is that you have to go seek opportunities. I am trained as a mathematician but I am thinking of getting into some high-tech area just to gain experience, get domain expertise, and hopefully find business opportunities. I'm considering robotics but not quite decided yet.
Honestly, I've never had trouble finding problems to solve (in life overall). Maybe one day I'll have a problem deficit and will need to go looking.
I try and focus on my most high impact problems and attack them. I attack problems in the normal engineer way (break it down, solve, solve, solve, break down further, solve, move up the problem tree).