Have you ever bought a course on Udemy, started following along with the first few lessons, and eventually found yourself mindlessly coding along with the instructor?
If you’re like me, then the answer is yes.
When this happens, you’re missing out on an opportunity to amplify the speed and depth at which you can learn. It comes down to this: you want to immediately set out to code something a little bit bigger while using the tutorial as a guide.
I believe that people are at their most resourceful when they swim in the deep end a little “too early” (WARNING: this does not apply to actual swimming 🏊♂️). Let’s take a look at a favorite of instructors all over the world: the TODO list app. There are many ways to amplify this project into something much greater than what it may have started as.
Note: If you are only starting to learn how to code, amplifying a tutorial project may be agonizing, but you will gain so much out of doing it.
Example: Level-up Your TODO List
At a base level, TODO list apps are such a solid choice for instructors. This is because they present an opportunity to teach students about CRUD operations in a certain language or technology. Chances are, they’ll involve some sort of database to persist the TODO entries. Of course, the UI will have to accommodate the necessary actions to get things working.
The skills required to make this app are necessary for pretty much every real-world project on the planet. And, when you think about it, the functionality of a TODO list is close to so many other potential app ideas. Some of these might include:
A workout tracker
A diet and nutrition tracker
An app for taking and storing notes
An app for tracking your learning progress
An app for remembering to water your plants
A full-stack Twitter clone …😉 just kidding
the list goes on and on.
By watching and using a TODO List tutorial as a guide, you will be able to get up and running with any of these app ideas. But when it comes time to put in place your own personal features that make your app different, you will have to start digging in places like Google and Stack Overflow for answers. Finding your own answers and coming to your own conclusions is the one necessary step in avoiding tutorial hell altogether.
The worst part about being in tutorial hell is that when you start feeling lost, or if your project isn’t working … you can rewind the content and find the root of your problem. This is not reflective o in real-world problem-solving.
Becoming reliant on a tutorial as the arbiter of all truth, even if only in the early stages of learning to code, is something that has held a lot of people back - myself included.
So, I’ll say it one more time. Finding your own answers and coming to your own conclusions is the one necessary step to stay out of tutorial hell for good.
Some Final Thoughts
There are a lot of ways to take matters into your own hands and get more out of tutorial content. As long as you are using the resources that you would use to solve real-world problems, you are avoiding, or beginning your escape from tutorial hell.
I don’t want to sound ungrateful or negative towards people that make great tutorial content. If anything, this is a celebration of that content with some guidance on how we can all start to use it a little bit more effectively.
Top comments (2)
hey man i was kinda new in this webDev world, because everytime i look up for another tutorial i feel so lost, so many things that i dont understand, do you have any tips for beginner like me ?
List out five ideas for a website. Build all five, increasing in complexity. Research different architectural paradigms like MVC, Service Facade, Functional. Use a different architecture on each project, learning the HTML, CSS, and JS it takes to code the project along the way. Reference other repos, reference guides like MDN, but try to avoid tutorials. In the beginning only use vanilla JS, add TypeScript in another project, use a JS library or framework for another project. Weigh the pros and cons of each approach, learn by doing.