I could stop learning to code today and still have enough saved material to last me into retirement. Tutorials in one app, threads in another, a bookmarks folder that functions less like a library and more like a landfill with good intentions. 🗑️
The saves pile up everywhere. Instagram saves. Facebook saves, which is impressive, because I do not remember deciding to store my education on Facebook. A "read later" pile that is, let's be honest, a write-only archive: things go in, nothing has ever come back out. At some point I stopped counting what I'd saved. That detail tells you most of what this article is about.
The market graded my hoarding, and it failed
Earlier this year I went through 30 beginner developer job ads word by word and tallied what they actually ask for. Two numbers from that tally still annoy me. "A list of many languages at once" — the breadth thing, the collect-everything instinct — appeared in 4 of the 30 ads. One language or framework done properly appeared in 24.
Read that again the way I had to. The market is asking for depth at six times the rate it asks for breadth, and my saved folders are organised almost perfectly backwards: forty ways to start things, nearly nothing about finishing one thing properly. Every save was a small vote for breadth. The ads never got my ballot.
And this wasn't only about links. I once watched 40 hours of tutorials in a stretch and still couldn't build the thing the tutorials were supposedly teaching. Forty hours. I could follow every lesson, nod at every example, and then sit in front of a blank editor like the knowledge had been stored in someone else's name. Watching is hoarding with a progress bar. The resource wasn't the bottleneck either time. It never is.
A save is a decision you're postponing
Here's the uncomfortable way I've started framing it. Finishing a tutorial is a decision: this material, this hour, this one thing, done. Saving it is the appearance of that decision with none of the cost. It feels like progress because the motion is similar. You found the resource. You judged it worthy. You clicked. Your brain files that under "handled" and moves on to find the next one, and the next one is always more fun to find than the last one was to finish.
I'm not anti-resource, and I'd be a hypocrite to pretend otherwise; some of my saves genuinely taught me things, the ones I actually opened. The ratio is the shame. For every resource in my piles that changed how I work, there are dozens that served exactly one purpose: making the evening I found them feel productive.
The experiment I'm running on myself
So, present tense, no results to sell you: for every new resource I save, I delete two from the pile. One in, two out. The pile shrinks or my saving slows down; either outcome fixes the problem from a different end.
The rule is deliberately a bit unfair, because fair rules got negotiated away by past me within a week. Deleting is the easy part mechanically and the hard part emotionally, which is interesting in itself. That little flinch when your cursor hovers over a saved advanced tutorial you were never going to watch? That flinch is the hoarding, caught in the open. The thing being protected was never the knowledge. It was the option to feel like someone who might learn it someday.
Maybe the experiment dies by next month and the pile wins. Possibly. But a beginner with 10 resources and 8 of them finished is, by the only scoreboard I tallied myself, closer to employable than a beginner with 400 saves and a guilty conscience. I know which of those two people I've been.
Now the confession booth, since I opened it. Two numbers, yours this time: how many things do you have saved right now, across every app, roughly — and how many of them have you actually finished? 📚 Mine is embarrassing in both directions. I suspect the gap between those two numbers is the most honest progress report most of us will ever write.
P.S. Everything I write stays free — that part doesn't change. But if this one was worth something to you, you can buy me a coffee ☕ (one-time or monthly, both work). It covers the API credits and hosting behind these experiments — and honestly, it's also the nudge that gets the next one started on the evenings I'd otherwise skip it. — Salam
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