Coding problems can seem overwhelming at first glance. Just take a look at this problem—Palindrome Number.

This is a problem on LeetCode, and in this problem, it says:
“Given an integer X, return true if X is a palindrome and false otherwise.”

This is overwhelming at first because we know how to determine if a number is a palindrome in our heads. We can just look at the order of the digits in the number and immediately determine if it’s a palindrome or not.

But how do we program this? We basically have to teach a computer how to do the very thing we’re doing in our heads.

This can feel counterintuitive or challenging at first because we do this naturally in our minds, but now we have to lay it out explicitly.

Coding problems can often feel like you’re teaching somebody who has zero intuition whatsoever—all they have is logic, and you have to appeal to that logic to teach them how to do something.

Coding problems are also kind of annoying because they don’t always seem very practical. Like, why would you ever want to code a function that tells you if a number is a palindrome? There’s not much emotional investment in these types of problems, which is another reason they can feel overwhelming—or at least, kind of annoying.

In this video, I’m going to go through an easy LeetCode problem—this one in particular—and I’m going to show you a classic way of breaking down coding problems into different steps so that you can solve your problems in a very systematic way.

Thank you for watching, and happy coding! 💻
-Henrik