Introduction
So how do we escape tutorial hell? Well, I should start from the very beginning. In the first part of this series, I reported that I did 20 coffee chats over one weekend. Since then I’ve been doing a similar number of coffee chats every weekend. I am now at a total of over 50 coffee chats!
That’s a whole lot of coffee.
Many may be asking why did I decide to do so many? Well, when I was learning how to code and program I was essentially self-taught and I had no mentors for me during that period. I always felt like it was something that could have been a great benefit.
So giving 15 minutes of my time to each of the individuals of the coffee chats felt like something that was worth it. And it’s a great way to meet people from around the world.
Tutorial Hell
One of the most common questions I received during the coffee chats is:
If there was one thing you could change about your journey, what would it be?
Coffee chatters
When I was learning I would jump from online Bootcamp to online Bootcamp. Freecodecamp to the Odin project to Udemy Courses to Youtube courses. Now don’t get me wrong, these can all be great resources, but doing this constant jumping around can be known as tutorial hell. Finishing one tutorial or resource and hopping on into the next.
At the end of every single one of them, I never felt like I truly grasped the concepts I needed. So why did I keep jumping around?
Well for precisely the same reason of feeling like I didn’t really understand the material as much as I thought I should have. I felt like whether it was HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or React that there was always something more to learn. I wanted to fill in every gap of knowledge to be prepared for my first future job.
The 100% Fallacy
While I had good intentions, this is a mistake, especially at the beginning of the learning journey. Going from tutorial to tutorial to achieve this imaginary 100% knowledge of a topic is very detrimental.
The reality is that reaching 100% learning with any of the topics is near impossible! This is the 100% fallacy. There will always be something more to learn.
Not only are there new libraries and frameworks coming out every year (or month), but actual APIs of these technologies are also changing from year to year.
But, then if 100% can’t be reached what’s the goal?
The goal isn’t to be the most knowledgeable person in HTML, CSS, JS, or anything else. The real goal is to be a developer. Once I realized this it became obvious what the next step was.
Escaping tutorial hell
The real solution is putting the skills learning from one tutorial, Bootcamp, etc into action.
Practice makes perfect
Generic inspirational quote
The meaningful learning, in my humble opinion, will always come when actually sitting down, opening up visual studio code and trying to code something, breaking it, and doing it all over again. Even if you have no novel idea it doesn’t matter! Cloning something for the purpose of learning is completely valid.
When I was first learning I couldn’t think of a problem to solve with the skillset I had so I decided to just make a clone of Twitter, without a tutorial. I literally just opened up their site, hit right-click, hit inspect, and tried my best to copy over what they did. Twitter spends millions of dollars and has hired some of the brightest minds trying to make their website as perfect as possible.
So by looking around the site and copying what they did I was technically learning from the best and where I felt like I gained the skills necessary for my first job. Just as a side note this project remained private and not commercial as I obviously don’t own any rights to Twitter.
And if that isn’t enough of an idea, you can always be inspired by a google search. Anything can work just don’t get stuck in decision paralysis to just code something to learn!
Conclusion
Although, it’s something that’s probably been said before I think it’s worth reiterating here. If you want to get good at weightlifting, then you lift. If you want to get good at swimming, then you swim. If you want to get good at coding, then you code.
No amount of tutorials will change this. So before opening up that next youtube video or possibly buying yet another Udemy course on the same topic, I urge you to consider just sitting down and coding something, anything.
If you have any other tips for escaping tutorial hell let me know in the comments below!
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Originally published at https://relatablecode.com on March 13, 2022.
Top comments (19)
This is such useful information. The best thing you can do is just build stuff! Like you said, even just cloning a project is worth it. Clone it and change a couple things in it.
And if you need other ideas, there are lots of resources out there. Like the Dev.to hackathons that take place every month or so. The one this month to build a project with the Deepgram speech-to-text API is a really good one, and I'm hoping to participate in future ones (can't participate in this one since I work for Deepgram, and no, this isn't a shameless plug - I truly think hackathons are an awesome way to challenge yourself to learn something new.
Love the article!
Didn't take it as a shameless plug at all! I completely agree with the hackathon idea especially if you can do it as a team.
Meet some people, make some friends and work on the soft skills needed for a team once you get the job. (and besides its usually more fun with others, but by yourself is fine too!)
There are several broad categories of how people learn.
Tutorial mini-projects or coding challenges are of little learning value for me.
I learn best with a good tutorial book, and a good reference manual. Charles Petzold's book Programming Windows is a good example of a book that panders to my style of learning. Or Dave Fancher's book The Book of F#. Or Aaron Hillegass's book Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X.
I also learn well from "monkey see monkey do". Not for tutorial mini-projects, but for cloning a real project and then futzing with it.
These are some good points. The futzing around part is where I get my best learning 😅
Very useful post, I would like to add some of my advice for self-taughts out there if you don't mind.
Consistency: This is in my opinion the major point for success be it coding or any other field of skills, You should aim to make coding a consistent habit, Always make sure that you're doing something related to code no matter how small or trivial it is. This is commonly known as no zero days.
Don't try to learn something unless you need it
It is no doubt that beginners will feel overwhelmed by the huge list of technologies out there, This sets you up in the famous trap of "I got to learn all of these!" and you would find yourself jumping from "technology A" tutorial to "technology B" tutorial endlessly.
So my advice is Don't learn something unless you need it!, You want to build a website ? HTML is the solution ? okay learn it, You want to style it now ? CSS is the solution ? okay learn it ? Adding interactivity ? Javascript ? then use javascript until you have a good reason to use a framework. You have no reason ? keep using javascript.
Completely agree! When I first started out I tried learning everything new that was coming out. Quickly becaming overwhelming.
I learned to just know of its existence, MAYBE read an article on how it works and dive deep as needed.
Formal education helps. Understanding that it is the mindset that matters and not knowing all the latest trending frameworks.
I started programming when I was about 14 and read and watched many tutorials. The learning path was random and I focused mainly on the tools. If it worked, then fine.
Then I attended university and became a BSc in software engineering. I learned abstract concepts like algorithms, data structures, boolean algebra, discrete mathematics, problem-solving techniques and so on. That's what made me a complete software engineer. That and many hours of coding, I have to agree with you on that.
Now "it works" is just not enough; the solution must implement the best algorithm, be the fastest and the one that uses the least resources possible.
As an analogy: canvases, paintbrushes and inks don't make the artist, the mindset does.
Definitely agree that the mindset usually translates to any endeavor, not just limited to programming. Similar to the famous adage "Understand the why not the how", this comes with wisdom and not knowledge.
Why certain technologies even exist and when to use them and that is independent of the tools.
That article made me realize that I'm in tutorial hell right now. All the time I think that I didn't learn enough in the last year, that there has to be more things I need to internalize before getting a job, that I need to feel more comfy with every topic that seems important to me.
But maybe it's time to trust myself and keep going on without a teacher, I'll have to be on stackoverflow nevertheless. ;)
I agree. Furthermore there is on the web, as for any type of information, many tutorials whose intention is not to teach you or to help you learn something, but are vague copies of official documentation. The only purpose of those tutorials are to gain visibility and doing marketing... It's not only tutorial hell, it's information's hell. Just try to find the truth by myself by experimenting things. Love some tutorials though, when they are seriously built, for having a quick and general information about a thing.
Yeah. I think tutorials in and of themselves aren't bad. They can be great resources like you said (when built well).
Also watching some vid not bad for grasping general idea
Beautifully put. I too feel the same as you felt. I feel I don't know enough to go forward. I will put what you said to practice. Thanks for the encouragement.
Glad you enjoyed it. Put it into practice and I'm positive you'll feel like you got a better grasp on things.
I was just inspecting dev.to website only, seems like I can learn pretty much from here also
There's no time like lab time.
I learning something by doin, coding.
Easiest way to escape tutorial hell? Don't do tutorials to start with. I'm 100% serious
I mostly agree, especially I feel that with more experience you'll learn to just read the docs and go from there. At the very beginning of learning just one (specifically for visual learners) can be OK.
But past that I feel it has diminishing returns.