This is a post I have thought about writing for a long time, I originally published it on my blog in more detail here. But, I thought it could help...
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Thanks for writing this post, I have experienced the frustration of asking for help being told to build projects and having no idea how to build them.
This post makes it really clear how I can now start building my own projects without having to follow tutorials.
Hey that's awesome I'm glad this post was helpful. Share your progress on twitter and I can check it out.
Thanks for writing this post.
This is a very important topic, most people either get stuck in tutorial hell, or they have an amazing idea but due to lack of planning, they never start or finish them.
Personally, I will be following these steps on a current project and see if I can finish it in a relatively small amount of time.
Thanks for the kind words.
Let me know as you go if you feel the post was missing anything. Good luck.
Very useful article! Tutorial hell is real and many go through that process and it's not easy to get through that phase.
My rule of thumb for this is to think that there is no course, tutorial or guide that eliminates the need to get your hands dirty and work hard, you may need them to know how to get started or to know what things you are missing, but the concept of "from zero to hero" without practicing and doing projects on your own is totally false.
The other barrier may be "having ideas", but now there are a lot of websites or posts here with cool and easy to do projects.
And don't worry about building something that isn't perfect, a finished project will always be better valued and more useful than a super elitist half-finished one.
Great points.
100% agree with not worrying about building something that isn't perfect, always better to have something finished that you can show vs. something half done buried in your projects folder.
Hi Peter,
thank you for your article. I had a good time reading it :)!
In my opinion, learning how to deal with your own work is a skill, that is very useful in many aspect of life. That's why I'm all the more pleased that your article exists.
Thanks for the support. Glad you liked it.
Great work. One thing I have to note is that planning is burdensome if you're not really feeling the inspiration to do the project. So my advise is to find a project you actually want to do or care about. Like if someone wants to build a CRUD and they like to play DOTA 2 for example, they could make a CRUD App of their favorite Dota 2 item builds for some character. The more motivated, the more likely they'll push through.
Great post!
As a professional developer for 3 months(ish) I can relate with the frustration while facing a complex project, and Trello became my best friend.
I've started building a "Personal API" to CRUD some information about my work-shifts, bookmarks etc, and I'm planning to extend it with a GUI (not sure yet if web or mobile).
The project is in it's early stages so I didn't add all cards yet. just the backend stuff, yet I would like to share a screenshot of my board, it may help somebody one day.
Amazing! Thanks for sharing the Trello board with a real world example. I think this will definitely help people.
What we usually do (even in huge projects) is we just start by defining the UI.
Once you have the UI you can break it into tasks.
But I'd say that if you're doing a personal project just go screen by screen till you're done. Also, make it work first, don't get too fancy. You can always make it better later.
I learned as a beginner that when I tried very very hard to come up with a good design that I'd end up throwing it away anyway. So don't try. Just make a minimal thing work and then refactor it into shape later.
Nothing better than watching something work rather than a bunch of code that does nothing yet because you still have to implement 20 classes.
Thanks for the post!
I think that's an idea that I had but now reading and it self being broken into steps it's more clear to me... I set a challenge to myself, complete a little project I wanted using your model, lets see how I go
I hope it helps, great idea to set a challenge.
DM me with how you're going with it on twitter.
Ooh, sure! It'd be nice to talk about it! Thanks for the attention
Thank you for the advice. Much needed.
I do use GitHub issues sometimes to track all the features I'm going to build and bugs I have found but after reading the post, I think trello is more organized.
You are missing a privacy section.
Privacy by design compliance
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Self-promotion
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Databunker will make your company or service privacy by design compliant and it is absolutely for free.
BR, Yuli
Thank you for posting this !
Right now I'm stucking in tutorials, i want to start building my own project but i always don't know how to start, don't know how to resolve a problem.
This will help me
Thanks for sharing your experience, that is exactely I needed to read as I feel the same frustrations which can give me doubts and feeling no confident at all.
A good post for me!
Pleasure, I was hoping it would resonate with others who felt the same frustrations.
I've read this kind of thing a half dozen times but never as concise and helpful, with examples, as today! Thank you!
I am already starting on the new project of the company here.
Bedside article.
thanks for the guidance
Nice one!! I’m always curious what it means by break down the components. Thanks!!
Thanks a million for this
awesome
A major concern about this, is the idea of "how many lines of code in language X should I churn out a day, accounting for debugging and testing suites?"
Another problem I can think of:
"am I overplanning? am I procrastinating on library finding?"
"how many feautres/LOC should I churn in a day?"
"should I focus on documentation (if it is a library)?"
thank you , that was helpful
Thank you for this post 🥰 I'll start planning even if it seems a small project
My pleasure glad you like it. It doesn't matter what size the project is, just as long as you can start planning and building it.