I strongly encourage self-taught developers to take a good theoretical algorithms class. In it, you'll learn to represent most problems as some sort of graph pr

I strongly encourage self-taught developers to take a good theoretical algorithms class. In it, you'll learn to represent most problems as some sort of graph problem and map the problem at hand to nodes, edges, etc. and find the most efficient way to solve it, prove your solution and show how long it takes. You'll also learn (more importantly) what classes of problems cannot be solved at all.