Tutorial purgatory
Do you know that feeling?
Like you’re stuck in this infinite loop of just watching tutorial after tutorial every single day, but you’re still not making any real progress towards becoming a developer🤔?
It's really common among developers🤪.
We've ALL been there🙂.
But the question is... how do you pull yourself out🤔🤔?
Thankfully, I got lucky and figured it out pretty soon when I was learning to code (but I still stumble on it sometimes when am learning something new)
So here’s the secret..
Projects.
BUILD PROJECTS.
Build a TON of them.
That’s it.
There’s no other way around it.
The more you build...
The more you break...
The more you learn…
Most times we watch alot or even download lots of tutorial videos on a language or framework or even a library
but most of those who watch it STILL don't know how to build an application like that from scratch, why?
It’s because most people just watch a tutorial and code along.
You don’t think beyond the code, you just code it up.
Don’t just code.
Think.
Think about what you’re coding in your IDE or text editor.
What does this for loop do?
Why do we have this piece of code here?
Ask questions to yourself and do some research why is this like this and so forth...
When you do that, you understand how the code works and why we do it the way we do.
This is what YOU have to do.
Take the code into your own hands and mess around with it.
BREAK IT.
Debug it on your own…
Google it.
Ask Questions and ask more
Figure out why it broke in the first place…
Now before you know it you’re building projects on your own.
Maybe you come up with a passion project that you’ve always wanted to build, and start working on that!
Keep taking on those clone applications to flex and build your skills, but start to customize them.
Make them your own.
Look for cool new features you could implement, find specific tutorials and figure out how to add them.
You’re thinking like a developer. That's great already.
And that’s really it.
Learn through projects and your growth will be MASSIVE.
Projects are what kept me out of tutorial hell as a new Software Engineer.
Real. World. Projects.
‘Cos not only do they unlock your learning... they also land you JOBS (On the long run we need funds actually).
That’s the real power of projects when you start taking this stuff seriously.
In conclusion
The fastest way to get out of tutorial hell is by building projects upon projects (try to finish one completely before going to another) add some extra features to the clone you are doing Change the colours use different style of icons or Change some design patterns.
And that's all.
If you got questions or confusion or anything you are free to hit me up would really love to help out as fast as I can.
Yusuf
Tech enthusiast
Twitter: Yusuf_software.
Top comments (4)
Great input Yusuf, It makes sense and im sure we've all been there. Building projects sounds like great advice from the tutorial "purgatory".
Thanks for the advice.
Thanks for this
You could recommend another topic to write on.
Really appreciate sir.
Straight to the point right up