There's a joke (or as my former professor might have said, "it's like a joke, it just lacks humor") about how programmers think: Programmer: "How do I make pasta?" Recipe: How to make pasta: Fill an empty pot with cold water Boil it Add pasta Programmer goes home and wants to make pasta. She sees a pot of boiling water already on the stove. So she pours it out, fills it up with cold water, boils it, then adds pasta. Again, like a joke, but potentially lacks humor. For those not "in the know," the joke is that programmers tend to reduce problems to ones they've already solved. In this case, the programmer already had a solution for making pasta. So, she changed things around until she could use it. In this case, we end up doing more work than necessary, but in general, this can be extremely effective. This week, the Google Doodle is pretty great. It's a coding game geared toward kids, in the same vein as Scratch or