It really bothers me a lot when I open YouTube and it's recommending video tutorials like "Full Stack [X] Clone in 6 Hours," with the shockingly smiling face on the thumbnail, as if the guy has cracked the core algorithm behind [X] and is going to reveal it to us. Let's open the video and watch it till the end.
1 hour passed just setting up third-party services such as Clerk for Auth, Supabase for Postgres and real-time, Stripe, Vercel, and so on.
Another hour passed, copy-pasting code from the creator's GitHub repo for the Tailwind theming and base components (because he instructed us to do so).
Okay, so now I'm going to learn something new—wait, what? Is this a frontend tutorial where more than half of the time I'm just copy-pasting code from the GitHub repo?
Okay, so we are 5 hours and 30 minutes into the video, and guess what? We've successfully built that clone (we don't know how, but yes, we did). Now we have to deploy it, but wait, it's already deployed to Vercel because, at the start, we connected our repo to Vercel's project. So, we are actually cooked already.
Let's put that link in my resume, thinking I'm the only one doing it and I'm going to nail it.
Now I'm in the interview.
First technical question: Why did you use Zustand instead of React Context?
Me: Hehehe... I think it's better.
Second question: Why did you choose Next.js instead of just using React?
Me: What? Can we actually use React alone without Next.js?
Interviewer: Yes.
Me: Okay, but Next.js provides better SEO benefits and performance.
Interviewer: It's a dashboard-based web app. Why do you need SEO-related benefits? And regarding performance, you can achieve that using only React.
Me: Hehehe... It just happened; I just wanted to build something.
Interviewer: So, you built it completely from scratch?
Me: (Thinking—I'm already messed up.)
This goes on, and I'm fired before getting hired.
I just don't get the point of these tutorials:
No brainstorming
No problem-solving
No logic building
No system design
No skepticism
No architectural discussion
No system-level thinking
Even no code at all (95% of the time it's copy-pasting)
In the end, one-click deployment—but why? The user is here to learn what happens behind the scenes of that one-click deployment, such as CI/CD, server setup, load balancing, triggers, and so on.
The only thing I'm learning from these kinds of tutorials is brainless frontend development.
Okay, so how should we learn? The answer is simple: just focus on the fundamentals. Do research about fundamentals. Read through the documentation of well-known technologies. Read tech/engineering blogs. Follow genuine mentors. Open your mind. Try building something completely from scratch using your own mind. Look for problems around you that can be solved with technology. Learn to debug, and that's how you actually learn and become valuable.
That's it.
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