exactly how i'd escape tutorial hell if i had to do it again

step by step - full guide

watching & following tutorials feels productive and that is the problem, at least it was for me.

i felt like every tutorial was going to be the last one and that once i’d completed this last 6 hour react tutorial i’d be able to build anything, obviously that was not the case.

i would grind through the tutorial, copying the code step by step, even typing along with the video to feel extra productive but alas the second i start building my own project and i ran into a bug i was stuck, straight to chatgpt for an answer (which is a whole other topic on its own btw).

dont get me wrong though, this can be a great way to get the absolute basics of language or topic, a high level overview is always a great way to begin learning something new but if you really want to deeply understand something tutorials that guide you every step of the way are not the way i’d go.

so what now? no tutorials? yes that’s right. im going to limit you to at absolute maximum 2 tutorials when you are starting to learn something new, lets take react as an example. there are hundreds of javascript basics tutorials all over the internet, watch two of those and then come back here. no more than two, okay?

now that we’ve got the basics out of the way, you have a high level overview of the language, we are still going with javascript, so you understand the basics of javascript and now you need to solidify this knowledge in your brain. in a past life i’d jump straight into another tutorial and follow it step by step and feel super productive, or so i thought…

the next step is something i learnt a while ago from another blog i read and its called question driven development, it sounds odd but give me a chance. what you’re going to do is think of a problem and then break it up into small, meaningful questions and then google (dont ask chatgpt) the answers to these questions to help you solve the overall problem. if you’re confused dont worry let’s do an example.

you google ‘beginner programming problems javascript’ and tons of lists of projects and problems come up, to start off with try to keep the number of unique lines of code written to about 100 or so. now after scrolling through websites and problems i find one called ‘palindrome checker’ for example, so now i’ll break this problem into smaller questions that will help me solve this problem.

if you’re very new your questions could be ‘how do i run javascript on my laptop’ or ‘which is the best ide for javascript’, but once you’ve done this a few times, and i recommend doing it with at least 50 different problems if you’re serious about learning, then you could start asking questions like ‘how do i read in a string in javascript’ and ‘how do i store a string in an array in javascript’, these questions are small parts of the full problem that will eventually lead you to an working solution for the ‘palindrome checker’ problem.

something very important that i strongly believe is at the start of learning anything new chatgpt is not your friend, a large amount of the learning process occurs when you’re brain has to piece bits of information together to make it make sense to you since stackoverflow answers are not directly related to your problem.

the problem with chatgpt is it does all the hard work for you of simplifying information down to easy to understand, digestible parts. this is bad. its fine when you’ve forgotten how to do something but not when you’re trying to learn it and engrain it into your mind. this deserves a whole new blog in itself.

now that you’ve solved 50 small problems, its time to move onto the big leagues… i want you to go find 3-4 already existing websites that you think are cool and clone them. yes you heard that correctly, the nice thing about cloning already existing websites is that it leaves very little room for procrastination. no need to think of a good idea or design the UI from scratch. lets do another example.

say i decide i want to clone the youtube homepage, what i’ll start doing is coming up with a plan and making use of question driven developer aka QDD again. i’m sure we are all familiar with youtube’s UI. i’ll start breaking it down into small parts.

so for starters there is the search bar, using QDD i’ll ask questions like ‘how do i create a search bar using html & css’ and then ‘how do i make a search bar functional using javascript’ etc. and then ill continue to do this for each part of the homepage until i’ve got a solid plan, then ill just get to work. googling, implementing, fixing bugs, googling more, implementing more, and googling even more. no chatgpt.

once you’ve done this a couple times and i officially release you from your tutorial hell rehab, you can start building some more original projects from scratch.

but lets face it you are always going to need tutorials so the best way is to build a healthy relationship with them instead of becoming dependent on them.

generally what i like to do is make sure i’m always learning and then building right after, lets say im watching a video on how to build a navbar with react, right afterwards ill go build 3 very average navbars just to solidify it in my mind.

learn and then build. simple. if you learnt something subscribe!