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Aditya Sorathiya
Aditya Sorathiya

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I’m a Student Developer. Is Building Projects Actually Better Than Following Tutorials?

I've spent the last few months building and maintaining my own projects instead of constantly jumping between tutorials.

It has been frustrating sometimes. I've had bugs that took hours to understand, deployments that broke, features that I later had to rewrite, and projects that nobody used.

But I've also learned things that I don't think I would have learned by simply completing tutorials.

So I'm curious:

For someone learning development, what do you think is more valuable — building projects or following structured courses?

Top comments (5)

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Seif Ahmed •

Both are valuable, that's why you should focus on both of them. You can first learn from structured courses, then build real project.

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Aditya Sorathiya •

I used to learn from YouTube videos
But are that time I didn't have a goal to build something
That habit or the interest was light up by Flask (python)
In that I first interacted with frontend backend and db
And that project was messagegpt
It was a simple ai chatbot only which used Gemini api

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Aditya Sorathiya •

The screen is bleeding to spellings might be wrong

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Seif Ahmed •

No worries. Can you tell me how MessageGPT works? I bet this is the flow:

  1. The client inputs the prompt.
  2. The prompt is sent to Gemini API.
  3. Gemini replies to the given input. Its reply is sent back to the client.
  4. The reply displays in the chat.
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Aditya Sorathiya •

Yes exactly that flow
But I stopped maintaining it as I can’t see more scope for that , I also added a ai website builder and publisher, mind map generator the ai site builder takes user prompt and gives just the html and i render that in my site and add a publish btn when its clicked a dialog box opens asking for the site name
I hosted them on netlify by using their api
That was cool but the design not