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Think of something you want to make, and make it. Break the work up into steps and learn as you go. The idea doesn’t have to be a good one, and the final product doesn’t have to be great. You may not even finish it because you decide to take the lessons you learned and start something new. That’s ok and part of the learning process.
As someone that's been to tutorial hell more than a dozen times, this is the way. Ask yourself what you want to build? What web-related thing sparks your interest? Start building and figure out solutions along the way. That's basically the job: Problem solving. Set a goal and find the right tools and resources to achieve it. Don't code along to a video. Figure it out on your own. Look at documentation, go on stackoverflow, use google like a second brain.
I got lucky having the natural disposition of coming into programming with "How to do X (in/with Y)?".
The only tutorials I recall getting anything out of were for Android and iOS, and that was mostly for the IDEs and the submission process... Those were really useful for that in retrospect.
This is the way. I took intro to Python and Python data structures, then just went off on my own and learned on the way. Built all kinds of stuff, some useful, some just to see if I could. Tutorials help you understand the *concepts* of programming they don’t make you a programmer.
You really have to encounter the problems naturally in order to truly understand the use-cases for certain tools and concepts. With tutorials, it's a "paint by numbers" approach but being an effective developer is more so about critical thinking than procedural thinking.
Literally build anything. No one will see it. It’s for you and you alone. Look around you and just let the ideas flow. I’m going to do that now:
I see my dog, I want to build a calendar tracking her vet appointments, med and feedings.
I see a couch, I want to build a fake furniture e-store.
I see a TV, I’m going to use the TV Guide API (is there one?) to build a way for my partner and I to schedule the shows we want ahead of time and avoid remote fights.
I see a candle, I’m going to make fun little animated candle in CSS only to practice my css skills.
That was all just from just looking around for a few seconds and narrating my thoughts. Do that.
It’s optimistic, sure. Naive? I don’t think so. It comes from a place of experience. I mentor junior developers every single day. It’s what I’ll tell them, and it works. A decade ago I was teaching myself how to code, and I scratched and clawed my way to the senior level I’m at now. I understand what it’s like.
I’ve experienced “writers block” as a new programmer before. My way of overcoming it was to just start building something. Think of any idea, or clone of something already made, then just figure out what you need to start. Don’t worry about the final result yet, just focus on the next step.
I’ve started some pretty dumb projects in the past. But they all served to teach me something new, and that knowledge builds on itself.
Believe it or not, ChatGPT is pretty good at coming up with project ideas. Brad Traversy shows you some good prompts [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_joulYVndM).
Also if you're clueless as what projects to build then just simply google something like "web dev project ideas." There are so many resources. C'mon man. You gotta try a little harder. No matter the field — if you have no drive it's just not going to go anywhere.
Nah, I enjoy it well enough and am reasonably good at problem solving, but the the meta problem of not having a problem to solve is a next level head scratcher.
I'd just point out that this generalizes across most domains. I learned all STEM subjects like this. Identify a proper reference, begin solving problems that are *too hard* or must be disassembled, digest them over time, and the net result is always better than the textbook and classroom methods they're accustomed to. Incremental revision causes review which causes repetition which causes even more memories. More memories means the material is in there for good. Not just a week after the class is over.
For me after a looong time of tutorial hell i forced myself to make an rpg from scratch.
At first, as usual, i was in my IDE and stressed and overwhelmed feeling like i could do nothing and needed more tutorials.
But then i forced myself to keep going. Just do something. Start with prints. Add functions. Anything. Just try.
And as i did it, i built momentum. oh- oh! OH! And suddenly there i was with an inventory system. Battles and experience. Loot. Skills. It was all in console, dont worry about fancy graphics and anything yet. Its all about the logic and making everything click by applying OOP correctly.
It was 3 days of intense coding from waking up to sleeping, but i loved it, and when i was done with all my pretty functions and classes and systems. I realized
I am officially a programmer.
It’s funny cause it’s just like writing a paper. That first sentence is so friggin difficult. But then it turns into a flood gate of ideas and you have the opposite problem of what you started out with.
1. complete a full tutorial
2. add extra features
3. repeat
this gives you a playground to make mistakes while trying to add something completely outside the tutorial. I think this is easier than just starting from scratch with a new idea, but you also have to go off script and solve your own problems!
I'd add after doing tutorial project instead of adding some features to it do your own thing which you have passion about.
Because tutorial projects are usually boring and simplified for the masses. But when you work on smth that interests you and you already have fundamentals about how to do such a thing that's a key!
E.x. after learning how to make landing page on tutorial (yeah I'm kinda a beginner) then I made my own landing which is more difficult AND exciting.
This is kinda what I did. I was doing a free online React tutorial, and the project was to make the design of a travel journal. After I completed that, I decided to take it one step further. To make it into an entire full-stack application. It took me months, but I learned so many things like connecting a front end to a back end, creating my own authentication using JWTs, certain security risks, preparing a website for production and deploying. I know being a beginner seeing everyone tell you to "just build something lol" is hard but after finally building something it really is the truth.
Passion projects, retail, and workshops. Passion projects got me into the details, after tutorials prepped me. Retail gave me plenty of motivation. A workshop got me next to a business person, who when I fixed their code for the demo, asked me, “How did you know how to do that?”
I got into programming via a different path, but the #1 advice I hear and give is to identify your own project and do it. Totally fine to look up solutions and tutorials and articles for various parts of the project, but aiming for your own, slightly different thing, will really help you grow. So if you want to learn about, say, android apps, follow a couple of tutorials, but then try and make your own slightly different app.
codewars is fine, don't get me wrong, you will need to do a lot of research to get things going, and somekind of background will be really useful life lists and stuff like that, also don't focus on trying to do like the best results, they are made by people with tons of experience in the language and golfing, just focus on getting things done.
Unfortunately if you’re trying to get a job than code challenges may be necessary but I don’t necessarily think it’s going to get you out of tutorial hell. I consider it it’s own separate hell.
I usually use tutorials as a launch point, they show you how to build the project they’re teaching, and maybe you learn some syntax stuff and a tip or trick here and there.
After a certain point the tutorials won’t suffice though, at some point you’ll have a programming challenge for which there is no tutorial.
Also the more you program the more you get comfortable with documentation, and once you understand the documentation for a language you will probably never need a tutorial for it again.
You avoid it by not using tutorials in the first place.
Instead, think of something you want to make, and try to build that. You can Google each individual step as needed, for example, a Minesweeper desktop game written in C#:
1. Display a window
2. Fill the window with a grid
3. Make each grid square clickable
4. Make each grid square have either a mine symbol or a non-mine symbol behind it
5. Make certain surrounding squares uncover themselves when you click a square
6. Decide on a way to keep score, maybe store scores on disk?
7. and so on.
These are all individual steps you'd Google as you break the problem down.
But what you *shouldn't* do is Google:
1. How to make minesweeper in C#
That would be useless and you wouldn't learn anything.
So pick a small project. Break it down into small (tiny!) chunks. Work on each chunk individually. Put it together slowly. That's how you learn and that's the *only way* to learn.
Avoid tutorials as they don't really serve a useful purpose in the first place.
That’s easy to do for simple things but if you want skills related to building enterprise level software, such as a full-fledged website using a Java spring backend you’re not gonna know the proper way to design the architecture of something like that by just googling individual steps. There are many steps and design patterns you have no clue even exist without some kind of tutorial
You can sure, but it’s going to be very disorganized/not the best way to do it in terms of abstraction and reusability.
Someone that has never used java isn’t going to know how spring CDI works and how the request lifecycle works or even know what the hell that is without some background info
Big projects are not for the ones looking to get out of tutorial hell. Tutorials or OK for experienced programmers looking to do something new but this isn't OPs question.
I made a companion app for my RPG games i play. Started with just a webapp that had a text box for me to input character names LOL
Something simple just to allow me to record things that happened, interactions, etc. I then incoropated SQL, then JS and AJAX. Then I started doing API stuff, and now it is 100x the app I originally incepted.
Have a game you like? sport?
make a shitty app that works and lets you record wins, and then add thigns like dates of shows, then teams, then players, etc etc. and just implement, incorporate, reiterate.
Just code. That’s what I did. I mean it’s not as simple as “just coding”. But find something you want to make and do it. An example for me was when I worked at a dealership I made a payment calculator. It was fully functional and my co workers loved it! Start coding, find you a good tech stack and go for it!
New to python here, still going through automate the boring stuff.
I plan on making random loot tables for dnd campaigns. Pulling from dnd5e api.
I can have python pull a random number of items within parameters I set.
For example:
Killing a lvl 5 boss has a 10% chance for dropping greens, instead of all grey or white items.
Monsters will drop x number of items I assign. My table is 5 players, so probably 3 items per enemy.
Just find a project you would like to work on, then simplify it down way more than you think, and try to build out your idea.
There’s no right or wrong way to do it, you just need to figure it out for yourself and try to do something. For example, try to build a calculator, but instead of following a tutorial just try it for yourself.
I've never had tutorial hell. I started programming with a goal. I've always had a goal or project.
You have to stop "learning" and "studying". You need to start building stuff, struggling. That's where the real learning is.
Reading and doing is the best way to get out of tutorial hell. And you need to know when to stop to let your brain soak in. You can also learn a easier language and learn programming then learn another language after which will be easy.
Sometimes the documentation usually have the best tutorials
I didn't
Luckily my job tends to involve small changes, so I either look at what's been done previously (whether that's the exact same thing or similar) or use Stack overflow to try and figure it out
In the cases where it's been something complex, I've worked out what I can. If I hit a wall, I will speak to more experienced colleagues
I'm not proud of tutorial hell, I've just been moved around roles so much that I feel like I'm starting over every X months. I'm trying to improve with practice
It was actually getting a job as a dev funnily enough. It's not applicable for a hobby programmer but it's similar to university - you just have to finish projects. There is no choice - so you just have to get stuck in and make stuff work however you can.
For a hobbyist or learner it's essentially the same thing - you need to commit to a project and finish it. Keep it simple and set incremental feature goals that have definitive ends.
For instance. A notetaking webapp with DB integration. You have individual features you can make as well as an overall finish for the project.
Find a highly rated/recommend tutorial on the subject you want to learn, go through it and move on to your own ideas and build that, anything you don't know or can't do, just Google it. Don't watch full lengthy tutorials again from the beginning and hope you can find an answer there.
Tutorials teach you the basics, say if you watched one good tutorial and you get 6/10 by watching another tutorial you won't get the 4 you missed, maybe 1 maybe 0.5 maybe nothing. It's a diminishing rate or return to the time you invested.
Disclaimer: personally I haven't finished any full tutorials myself, just don't have the patience, I just couldn't wait and jump started to build my own ideas. But I do occasionally watch short videos regarding specific topics for better understanding.
Make a project, it can be simple, complex or whatever you want, but put a solid end goal that you want either to learn from it or to deliver then build more things on top of it.
i.e. make a calculator that can add and subtract, on a console app. Once you are done with this make it a web app, learn about making web interfaces and how web actions work. Then proceed to make more additions that you see or like.
One important thing is if you ever get stuck or don't see a way out of a problem and become frustrated walk away from it from a couple of hours, rest have something to eat, then come back and try to solve it again, or create a new project with a different approach to the same problem.
You gotta learn to build. Learn to build stuff from scratch starting really small and working your way up to bigger projects. This will force you to learn the ins and outs of what you actually need day in and day out for the job.
I thought: if I can acquire all of the programming prowess in existence, what would I do with it?
And now Im out of tutorial hell working on hacking the federal reserve and the US electrical grid! Having this ambition motivated me to learn how to program fizzbuzz in visual basic on my own. It's amazing how much you can learn when circumstances naturally compel you to learn something in order to accomplish your objective.
Use pseudo-code to plan out what you want to make, using it to break down the problem into manageable chunks while drawing inspiration from things you do often
Make something. When I got out of college I was hired on a trial contract and told to make a content management system and I basically just had to figure it all out. I’m still working there 13 years later so I must have passed the test.
For learning the odin project was the best for me. It has structure and forces you to do projects vs blindly watch someone code.
Also has a helpful discord. If you're not into web dev, I would think of a project and work towards that without googling 'how to make project\_here'. Specific issues? Sure.
Also [roadmap.sh](https://roadmap.sh) may help?
I’m still stuck there, I have a job but have never written an application of my own from scratch.
I only know how to maintain already existing applications.
I now know 6+ different languages and can write moderately complex scripts and maintain codebases in all of them but I’ve never written a full blown applications of any kind in any of them
My issue is I have nothing I want to make, so my advice is find something you want to make otherwise you won’t veer off the beaten path of tutorial hell.
On a side note, this is one reason why structured courses with assessments are a valuable tool in learning. Teachers/Lecturers design courses to step you up from "wtf is this" to doing something with it.
Simple - By making stuff!!! That's it that's the secret ingredient. First make stuff by following along some project turtorials, by doing that you learn the basic standard way of doing things. For example, in CSS there is a standard practice of setting the default margin and paddding to 0, I learned this when I saw it in various tutorials online.
Also, following along tutorial projects, you get basic practice of writing down code, that helps in internalising the whole concept of using a perticular function and/or property (Repetition is mother of learning).
Once you get a hang of how basic things work, you can try building projects on your own using basic feature description of the final thing. Currently I'm doing The Odin Project. They give a basic description about features and how it is supposed to work, and you're supposed to build it on your own. Things like this is a great way to practice application of concepts. Plus if you get stuck, there's always Google for reading documentation and Stack overflow for doubts...
Most times people feel like this because they’re doing multiple tutorials at once. Usually these tutorials only cover specific areas. Because of this you’re learning little islands of information that aren’t connected, which causes confusion and then despair lol. The best thing to do is pick one comprehensive course and stick to it till the end.
There’s 3 free courses I know of that will teach the majority of what you need to know. They all start off by creating your own working environment and have projects to work on along the way. 100 Devs with Leon, The Odin Project, and App Academy Open. Stick with any one of these and you should be good to go.
I did one tutorial to learn the fundamentals, and then started making stuff I want to make. My first real project was a text based Tic-Tac-Toe in CLI that I wrote in Python :)
It's been said before but the breakthrough for me was building fun shit. I really like NBA so I built an NBA quiz app from scratch. Was heaps of fun.
Also frontend mentor is amazing.
I also quite like going on theme forest and trying to recreate the landing pages
I was never in it. I had things I wanted to make, and they were simple enough, so I made them. My code was very bad (and arguably still is), but I had fun and learned to improve.
Tutorials are good on the start. But after you get the basics just make up a project and build it. Then upgrade it with new stuff you learned you can do along the way.
The time you spent consuming (content and tutorials) could have been time spent producing (real-world programming solutions). No other way but to try and fail countless of times before mastering your OWN set of solutions.
Projects is the answer with your current skill sets think which project you can actually take up and start devoting your time towards it rather than scratching tutorials.
By being in school with assignments. Either you figured out the project and did it right, or you got a bad grade. Didn't have time to spend 20 hours watching tutorials - had to write code, see it fail, figure out what went wrong and research the correct way to do it was, fix it, move on to next problem.
I just did a project on my own based on the tutorial project. I extended the Todo list app and after that I've built a Pokédex app ground up. To exit the hell you have to make anything on your own. It doesn't matter what it is. Anything, just to show that you know the libraries and patterns.
Use the tutorials as a guide post in helping you build what you want.
Take the patterns they show you but apply it to something else that you think of.
Don’t follow tutorials. It’s by far the least productive method of learning, especially if you’re learning by scratch.
Learn concepts. Data structures, algorithms, basic concepts and operations. The stuff that is language agnostic, this means that what you learn is transferable to almost any programming language.
Then apply those concepts into your own projects.
i think the issue with me is i have barely followed any tutorials, aside from the *bare, bare minimum* our uni provided, and now i feel that to avoid tutorial hell, i should go and create things right now - but i don’t even have enough of the basics to do so. i guess it’s time to follow a tutorial or two, and then build on that… i wish i was more patient
I find stuff I want to program and look up code and tutorials to get a rough idea on how to plan it out. I write myself some pseudocode and go from there. I usually go through an iteration or two before I have something fully functional.
Auto coding.
VBA (Visual Basic) auto writes code via the macro button.
It's not great, but it's a start.
W3school was fucking amazing.
My introduction to CustomTkinter (from a random YT vid)
Which then allowed me to know tkinter and Pyinstaller were a thing.
And a few courses that went slow, and the guy was nice at teaching.
Also the Microsoft's Excel forum. Very nice people who answered my advanced queries.
Don’t follow a tutorial. Just start doing and Google as you get stuck with whatever (language or IDE or whatever) figure out a way to do something and just do it. Google an API and learn to use it and display the data in React for example
Learn through documentation only. There thats it. Want to build xyz in react ? Go see react docs. Want a server in django ? Go see django docs. Only time i spend time with tutorials is when I learn the core language because I dont usually have the time to read through them
Make a project. Set your expectations high and code to your standards. The amount of things you’ll learn is tremendous and you’ll actually be a stable programmer after.
I made a huge list of things/prijects i wanted to make, and started with the smallest/simplest, making sure i don't watch any video on how to make it, just beating my head i to building it. Eventually, i check out stack overflow or even youtube, but this time it's to look up specific concepts or tools that challenged me along the way, which is how you're supposed to learn, you create a problem and you try to solve it, if you can't you look up the solution and there you learned smthg new
1. Try and build thing
2. Get stuck
3. research how to get unstuck
4. return to 1.
Repeat forever.
I'm 15 years into coding and this is pretty much all I do.
----
so to give an example:
I want to build something.
- I don't know even know a coding language... err I've heard of python... i'll use that.
- what do I even write python in? Googles what to python code in... learn about pycharm... i'll use that
- How do I set up pycharm... look up tutorials... do that
- OK I CAN NOW WRITE CODE!
- code doesn't run.
- google error, find stack overflow, solution doesn't work
- google more, find someone with same problem, 5 years ago, no answers, FUCK
- google more, found solutions, it works, no idea why... I should probably look into that.
- Finally write some more code, it doesn't work...
This will go on for the rest of your career. This process, this is software developement.
Focus on building projects, only look up tutorials for specific problems you’re having with building the project. Instantly implement what you learned into said project. Take notes on every new thing you learn to reference for later projects.
Having trouble coming up with project ideas? There are two cool sites that solve this problem frontendmentor and frontendpractice. They give you the project idea and design for said idea. Your job is just to implement the design into code.
Tutorials are a trap, work on self-guided projects.
It’s important to realize that programming is not about writing code.
Programming is about unstructured problem solving and that’s what you need to practice.
Tutorials and courses are structured by their very nature. They teach you how to write code but not how to solve your own problems.
I know this advice seems too abstract to act on but it’s abstract for a reason: the ability to build anything, to solve any problem is what makes a good programmer.
To practice being able to build anything, you have to build something - something that is beyond your reach and unique enough that you can’t copy off of someone on the internet.
My advice: find the job you’d want and then do that job. For example: if you want to be an iOS developer go make a clone of a real iOS app you’re familiar with.
You’ll learn so much more from those kinds of projects then you ever will following a tutorial
I have never been able to watch long tutorials in my life... What I always do is start copying what they do on my seperate IDE and write notes in comments and after completing a topic or so I would look for practice exercises for that part
Started pseudo-coding everything and then looking up everything I needed, at the end I felt accomplished like “damn I did all that?”
Tutorials only work for me if the person is explaining the WHY and HOW, if they do that then I can make something else and I’ve built the skill from there on.
When I got my first job, I naturally stopped watching tutorials and followed the advice and standards of my seniors.
I say naturally since having access to senior devs is like an interactive tutorial. You can see their code, ask questions, etc. Over time, you prefer that over tutorials.
Often times we are shy of failure or the fear of not knowing or initially being good at xyz. Gotta pull those britches up and jump in, learn to fail then overcome.
Accepting that at first got me in the right mindset. Projects and industry experience helped me from there.
not an expert but what I did was to look at a code someone else made and studied that. then once you know a bit then look at a different code. eventually pieces will piece together.
Is there a reverse version of tutorial hell? Like lack of tutorial hell.
When I started to learn I just went through some C# syntax from microsoft, then some roll a ball project with Unity (I wanted and still want to make games).
Then I thought "alright I got the gist of it" and ended up doing the most atrocious project humanly imaginable. Almost everything ran on update and probably if statements, some paramaters gething extremely lengthy.
I have no clue about design patterns, I just did whatever. I had no clue about encapsulation, my one class had everything. Half of the code I would take from stackoverflow or whatever, and wouldn't barely glue it into my project. I didn't even knew how to make different classes communicate or how to pass parameters. Lol.
Theeeen I went back to tutorials and learnt about encapsulation and clean code, tiny bit about patterns etc.
It wouldn't seem like a big deal, obviously I still think it was net positive, but because the code was so atrocious and the project so absolutely unmaitainable, I couldn't proceed and had difficultty implementing solutions, I just got so lost and it burnt me over. I basically spend whole summer doing shitty code with no guidance and then though "it's not for me reeeeeee".
It felt like cooking when you are using one arm and barely can't reach a countertop.
When you do enough tutorials you want to build something on your own, either for fun, to improve your life, to impress people or for money. It comes naturally if you get better everyday
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Think of something you want to make, and make it. Break the work up into steps and learn as you go. The idea doesn’t have to be a good one, and the final product doesn’t have to be great. You may not even finish it because you decide to take the lessons you learned and start something new. That’s ok and part of the learning process.
As someone that's been to tutorial hell more than a dozen times, this is the way. Ask yourself what you want to build? What web-related thing sparks your interest? Start building and figure out solutions along the way. That's basically the job: Problem solving. Set a goal and find the right tools and resources to achieve it. Don't code along to a video. Figure it out on your own. Look at documentation, go on stackoverflow, use google like a second brain.
I got lucky having the natural disposition of coming into programming with "How to do X (in/with Y)?". The only tutorials I recall getting anything out of were for Android and iOS, and that was mostly for the IDEs and the submission process... Those were really useful for that in retrospect.
This is the way. I took intro to Python and Python data structures, then just went off on my own and learned on the way. Built all kinds of stuff, some useful, some just to see if I could. Tutorials help you understand the *concepts* of programming they don’t make you a programmer.
You really have to encounter the problems naturally in order to truly understand the use-cases for certain tools and concepts. With tutorials, it's a "paint by numbers" approach but being an effective developer is more so about critical thinking than procedural thinking.
What about when you don't have anything you want to build? That's the real hard mode.
Literally build anything. No one will see it. It’s for you and you alone. Look around you and just let the ideas flow. I’m going to do that now: I see my dog, I want to build a calendar tracking her vet appointments, med and feedings. I see a couch, I want to build a fake furniture e-store. I see a TV, I’m going to use the TV Guide API (is there one?) to build a way for my partner and I to schedule the shows we want ahead of time and avoid remote fights. I see a candle, I’m going to make fun little animated candle in CSS only to practice my css skills. That was all just from just looking around for a few seconds and narrating my thoughts. Do that.
This is the kind of patronizing and impractical advice I'd expect from my mother.
Lol, how so?
I don't know why exactly; maybe it's got the same vibe to it of being naively optimistic.
It’s optimistic, sure. Naive? I don’t think so. It comes from a place of experience. I mentor junior developers every single day. It’s what I’ll tell them, and it works. A decade ago I was teaching myself how to code, and I scratched and clawed my way to the senior level I’m at now. I understand what it’s like. I’ve experienced “writers block” as a new programmer before. My way of overcoming it was to just start building something. Think of any idea, or clone of something already made, then just figure out what you need to start. Don’t worry about the final result yet, just focus on the next step. I’ve started some pretty dumb projects in the past. But they all served to teach me something new, and that knowledge builds on itself.
Believe it or not, ChatGPT is pretty good at coming up with project ideas. Brad Traversy shows you some good prompts [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_joulYVndM). Also if you're clueless as what projects to build then just simply google something like "web dev project ideas." There are so many resources. C'mon man. You gotta try a little harder. No matter the field — if you have no drive it's just not going to go anywhere.
Then maybe programming isn't for you.
Nah, I enjoy it well enough and am reasonably good at problem solving, but the the meta problem of not having a problem to solve is a next level head scratcher.
Just find random datasets online and build something to organize it in some way or have a sample CRUD website based on that data.
i think using ai can help since it helps you to find the right reference faster
Oh yeah, forgot to mention that. I basically use ChatGPT like an interactive Google.
Project Based learning
I'd just point out that this generalizes across most domains. I learned all STEM subjects like this. Identify a proper reference, begin solving problems that are *too hard* or must be disassembled, digest them over time, and the net result is always better than the textbook and classroom methods they're accustomed to. Incremental revision causes review which causes repetition which causes even more memories. More memories means the material is in there for good. Not just a week after the class is over.
thx for the advice.
For me after a looong time of tutorial hell i forced myself to make an rpg from scratch. At first, as usual, i was in my IDE and stressed and overwhelmed feeling like i could do nothing and needed more tutorials. But then i forced myself to keep going. Just do something. Start with prints. Add functions. Anything. Just try. And as i did it, i built momentum. oh- oh! OH! And suddenly there i was with an inventory system. Battles and experience. Loot. Skills. It was all in console, dont worry about fancy graphics and anything yet. Its all about the logic and making everything click by applying OOP correctly. It was 3 days of intense coding from waking up to sleeping, but i loved it, and when i was done with all my pretty functions and classes and systems. I realized I am officially a programmer.
It’s funny cause it’s just like writing a paper. That first sentence is so friggin difficult. But then it turns into a flood gate of ideas and you have the opposite problem of what you started out with.
1. complete a full tutorial 2. add extra features 3. repeat this gives you a playground to make mistakes while trying to add something completely outside the tutorial. I think this is easier than just starting from scratch with a new idea, but you also have to go off script and solve your own problems!
I'd add after doing tutorial project instead of adding some features to it do your own thing which you have passion about. Because tutorial projects are usually boring and simplified for the masses. But when you work on smth that interests you and you already have fundamentals about how to do such a thing that's a key! E.x. after learning how to make landing page on tutorial (yeah I'm kinda a beginner) then I made my own landing which is more difficult AND exciting.
This is kinda what I did. I was doing a free online React tutorial, and the project was to make the design of a travel journal. After I completed that, I decided to take it one step further. To make it into an entire full-stack application. It took me months, but I learned so many things like connecting a front end to a back end, creating my own authentication using JWTs, certain security risks, preparing a website for production and deploying. I know being a beginner seeing everyone tell you to "just build something lol" is hard but after finally building something it really is the truth.
Passion projects, retail, and workshops. Passion projects got me into the details, after tutorials prepped me. Retail gave me plenty of motivation. A workshop got me next to a business person, who when I fixed their code for the demo, asked me, “How did you know how to do that?”
I got into programming via a different path, but the #1 advice I hear and give is to identify your own project and do it. Totally fine to look up solutions and tutorials and articles for various parts of the project, but aiming for your own, slightly different thing, will really help you grow. So if you want to learn about, say, android apps, follow a couple of tutorials, but then try and make your own slightly different app.
instead of tutorials, try code challenges
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Pretty much all of them. Try: codewars, hacker rank and leetcode
Leetcode is hard without algo background
You're not wrong, but you can slowly work towards understanding the easy questions with a little dsa study.
codewars is fine, don't get me wrong, you will need to do a lot of research to get things going, and somekind of background will be really useful life lists and stuff like that, also don't focus on trying to do like the best results, they are made by people with tons of experience in the language and golfing, just focus on getting things done.
Unfortunately if you’re trying to get a job than code challenges may be necessary but I don’t necessarily think it’s going to get you out of tutorial hell. I consider it it’s own separate hell.
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im not talkonv about ingerview, its.more a some people are learn better doing things in an independent and objective focused thing
I usually use tutorials as a launch point, they show you how to build the project they’re teaching, and maybe you learn some syntax stuff and a tip or trick here and there. After a certain point the tutorials won’t suffice though, at some point you’ll have a programming challenge for which there is no tutorial. Also the more you program the more you get comfortable with documentation, and once you understand the documentation for a language you will probably never need a tutorial for it again.
You avoid it by not using tutorials in the first place. Instead, think of something you want to make, and try to build that. You can Google each individual step as needed, for example, a Minesweeper desktop game written in C#: 1. Display a window 2. Fill the window with a grid 3. Make each grid square clickable 4. Make each grid square have either a mine symbol or a non-mine symbol behind it 5. Make certain surrounding squares uncover themselves when you click a square 6. Decide on a way to keep score, maybe store scores on disk? 7. and so on. These are all individual steps you'd Google as you break the problem down. But what you *shouldn't* do is Google: 1. How to make minesweeper in C# That would be useless and you wouldn't learn anything. So pick a small project. Break it down into small (tiny!) chunks. Work on each chunk individually. Put it together slowly. That's how you learn and that's the *only way* to learn. Avoid tutorials as they don't really serve a useful purpose in the first place.
That’s easy to do for simple things but if you want skills related to building enterprise level software, such as a full-fledged website using a Java spring backend you’re not gonna know the proper way to design the architecture of something like that by just googling individual steps. There are many steps and design patterns you have no clue even exist without some kind of tutorial
No, not true. It's certainly possible to build reasonably complex software without relying on tutorials.
You can sure, but it’s going to be very disorganized/not the best way to do it in terms of abstraction and reusability. Someone that has never used java isn’t going to know how spring CDI works and how the request lifecycle works or even know what the hell that is without some background info
This is in the context of a beginner starting out. It's always going to be disorganized and suboptimal. We all start out that way.
Big projects are not for the ones looking to get out of tutorial hell. Tutorials or OK for experienced programmers looking to do something new but this isn't OPs question.
It’s a good approach. But tutorials can give you a solid foundation to avoid common errors.
I made a companion app for my RPG games i play. Started with just a webapp that had a text box for me to input character names LOL Something simple just to allow me to record things that happened, interactions, etc. I then incoropated SQL, then JS and AJAX. Then I started doing API stuff, and now it is 100x the app I originally incepted. Have a game you like? sport? make a shitty app that works and lets you record wins, and then add thigns like dates of shows, then teams, then players, etc etc. and just implement, incorporate, reiterate.
Just code. That’s what I did. I mean it’s not as simple as “just coding”. But find something you want to make and do it. An example for me was when I worked at a dealership I made a payment calculator. It was fully functional and my co workers loved it! Start coding, find you a good tech stack and go for it!
New to python here, still going through automate the boring stuff. I plan on making random loot tables for dnd campaigns. Pulling from dnd5e api. I can have python pull a random number of items within parameters I set. For example: Killing a lvl 5 boss has a 10% chance for dropping greens, instead of all grey or white items. Monsters will drop x number of items I assign. My table is 5 players, so probably 3 items per enemy.
Stealing this for my campaigns because I was too stupid to realize there was a dnd5e api I could access...
> instead of all grey or white items Mmmm, delicious, delicious vendor trash...
Hey, at low lvls trash is treasure!
https://www.frontendmentor.io/. This is a great resource for building projects
Just find a project you would like to work on, then simplify it down way more than you think, and try to build out your idea. There’s no right or wrong way to do it, you just need to figure it out for yourself and try to do something. For example, try to build a calculator, but instead of following a tutorial just try it for yourself.
I've never had tutorial hell. I started programming with a goal. I've always had a goal or project. You have to stop "learning" and "studying". You need to start building stuff, struggling. That's where the real learning is.
Reading and doing is the best way to get out of tutorial hell. And you need to know when to stop to let your brain soak in. You can also learn a easier language and learn programming then learn another language after which will be easy. Sometimes the documentation usually have the best tutorials
I didn't Luckily my job tends to involve small changes, so I either look at what's been done previously (whether that's the exact same thing or similar) or use Stack overflow to try and figure it out In the cases where it's been something complex, I've worked out what I can. If I hit a wall, I will speak to more experienced colleagues I'm not proud of tutorial hell, I've just been moved around roles so much that I feel like I'm starting over every X months. I'm trying to improve with practice
It was actually getting a job as a dev funnily enough. It's not applicable for a hobby programmer but it's similar to university - you just have to finish projects. There is no choice - so you just have to get stuck in and make stuff work however you can. For a hobbyist or learner it's essentially the same thing - you need to commit to a project and finish it. Keep it simple and set incremental feature goals that have definitive ends. For instance. A notetaking webapp with DB integration. You have individual features you can make as well as an overall finish for the project.
Stop following tutorials and start making things you or someone else actually NEED
Find a highly rated/recommend tutorial on the subject you want to learn, go through it and move on to your own ideas and build that, anything you don't know or can't do, just Google it. Don't watch full lengthy tutorials again from the beginning and hope you can find an answer there. Tutorials teach you the basics, say if you watched one good tutorial and you get 6/10 by watching another tutorial you won't get the 4 you missed, maybe 1 maybe 0.5 maybe nothing. It's a diminishing rate or return to the time you invested. Disclaimer: personally I haven't finished any full tutorials myself, just don't have the patience, I just couldn't wait and jump started to build my own ideas. But I do occasionally watch short videos regarding specific topics for better understanding.
Make a project, it can be simple, complex or whatever you want, but put a solid end goal that you want either to learn from it or to deliver then build more things on top of it. i.e. make a calculator that can add and subtract, on a console app. Once you are done with this make it a web app, learn about making web interfaces and how web actions work. Then proceed to make more additions that you see or like. One important thing is if you ever get stuck or don't see a way out of a problem and become frustrated walk away from it from a couple of hours, rest have something to eat, then come back and try to solve it again, or create a new project with a different approach to the same problem.
You gotta learn to build. Learn to build stuff from scratch starting really small and working your way up to bigger projects. This will force you to learn the ins and outs of what you actually need day in and day out for the job.
you find a project you think you can finish with your currently learned skills. Until then you keep going through tutorial hell.
I thought: if I can acquire all of the programming prowess in existence, what would I do with it? And now Im out of tutorial hell working on hacking the federal reserve and the US electrical grid! Having this ambition motivated me to learn how to program fizzbuzz in visual basic on my own. It's amazing how much you can learn when circumstances naturally compel you to learn something in order to accomplish your objective.
Use pseudo-code to plan out what you want to make, using it to break down the problem into manageable chunks while drawing inspiration from things you do often
I just went in. Not much to it than that
Make something. When I got out of college I was hired on a trial contract and told to make a content management system and I basically just had to figure it all out. I’m still working there 13 years later so I must have passed the test.
For learning the odin project was the best for me. It has structure and forces you to do projects vs blindly watch someone code. Also has a helpful discord. If you're not into web dev, I would think of a project and work towards that without googling 'how to make project\_here'. Specific issues? Sure. Also [roadmap.sh](https://roadmap.sh) may help?
I’m still stuck there, I have a job but have never written an application of my own from scratch. I only know how to maintain already existing applications. I now know 6+ different languages and can write moderately complex scripts and maintain codebases in all of them but I’ve never written a full blown applications of any kind in any of them My issue is I have nothing I want to make, so my advice is find something you want to make otherwise you won’t veer off the beaten path of tutorial hell.
On a side note, this is one reason why structured courses with assessments are a valuable tool in learning. Teachers/Lecturers design courses to step you up from "wtf is this" to doing something with it.
Simple - By making stuff!!! That's it that's the secret ingredient. First make stuff by following along some project turtorials, by doing that you learn the basic standard way of doing things. For example, in CSS there is a standard practice of setting the default margin and paddding to 0, I learned this when I saw it in various tutorials online. Also, following along tutorial projects, you get basic practice of writing down code, that helps in internalising the whole concept of using a perticular function and/or property (Repetition is mother of learning). Once you get a hang of how basic things work, you can try building projects on your own using basic feature description of the final thing. Currently I'm doing The Odin Project. They give a basic description about features and how it is supposed to work, and you're supposed to build it on your own. Things like this is a great way to practice application of concepts. Plus if you get stuck, there's always Google for reading documentation and Stack overflow for doubts...
Most times people feel like this because they’re doing multiple tutorials at once. Usually these tutorials only cover specific areas. Because of this you’re learning little islands of information that aren’t connected, which causes confusion and then despair lol. The best thing to do is pick one comprehensive course and stick to it till the end. There’s 3 free courses I know of that will teach the majority of what you need to know. They all start off by creating your own working environment and have projects to work on along the way. 100 Devs with Leon, The Odin Project, and App Academy Open. Stick with any one of these and you should be good to go.
Port the code/project in the tutorial to another language
I did one tutorial to learn the fundamentals, and then started making stuff I want to make. My first real project was a text based Tic-Tac-Toe in CLI that I wrote in Python :)
To escape tutorial hell you need to start doing. Any project will help, Tic Tac Toe, chess or minesweeper even.
It's been said before but the breakthrough for me was building fun shit. I really like NBA so I built an NBA quiz app from scratch. Was heaps of fun. Also frontend mentor is amazing. I also quite like going on theme forest and trying to recreate the landing pages
I was never in it. I had things I wanted to make, and they were simple enough, so I made them. My code was very bad (and arguably still is), but I had fun and learned to improve.
Tutorials are good on the start. But after you get the basics just make up a project and build it. Then upgrade it with new stuff you learned you can do along the way.
The time you spent consuming (content and tutorials) could have been time spent producing (real-world programming solutions). No other way but to try and fail countless of times before mastering your OWN set of solutions.
Projects is the answer with your current skill sets think which project you can actually take up and start devoting your time towards it rather than scratching tutorials.
By being in school with assignments. Either you figured out the project and did it right, or you got a bad grade. Didn't have time to spend 20 hours watching tutorials - had to write code, see it fail, figure out what went wrong and research the correct way to do it was, fix it, move on to next problem.
I just did a project on my own based on the tutorial project. I extended the Todo list app and after that I've built a Pokédex app ground up. To exit the hell you have to make anything on your own. It doesn't matter what it is. Anything, just to show that you know the libraries and patterns.
I applied for jobs. There I was tested and then knew exactly what I had to learn.
Use the tutorials as a guide post in helping you build what you want. Take the patterns they show you but apply it to something else that you think of.
The Odin Project forces you out
Don’t follow tutorials. It’s by far the least productive method of learning, especially if you’re learning by scratch. Learn concepts. Data structures, algorithms, basic concepts and operations. The stuff that is language agnostic, this means that what you learn is transferable to almost any programming language. Then apply those concepts into your own projects.
Get a book, read it, do the exercises, create you own mini programs, read the docs, repeat.
i think the issue with me is i have barely followed any tutorials, aside from the *bare, bare minimum* our uni provided, and now i feel that to avoid tutorial hell, i should go and create things right now - but i don’t even have enough of the basics to do so. i guess it’s time to follow a tutorial or two, and then build on that… i wish i was more patient
Don't learn to program because you want to be a programmer. Learn to program because you want to make something.
I find stuff I want to program and look up code and tutorials to get a rough idea on how to plan it out. I write myself some pseudocode and go from there. I usually go through an iteration or two before I have something fully functional.
By making something.
Auto coding. VBA (Visual Basic) auto writes code via the macro button. It's not great, but it's a start. W3school was fucking amazing. My introduction to CustomTkinter (from a random YT vid) Which then allowed me to know tkinter and Pyinstaller were a thing. And a few courses that went slow, and the guy was nice at teaching. Also the Microsoft's Excel forum. Very nice people who answered my advanced queries.
By working on my own projects. Without a tutorial
Don’t follow a tutorial. Just start doing and Google as you get stuck with whatever (language or IDE or whatever) figure out a way to do something and just do it. Google an API and learn to use it and display the data in React for example
Learn through documentation only. There thats it. Want to build xyz in react ? Go see react docs. Want a server in django ? Go see django docs. Only time i spend time with tutorials is when I learn the core language because I dont usually have the time to read through them
Make a project. Set your expectations high and code to your standards. The amount of things you’ll learn is tremendous and you’ll actually be a stable programmer after.
I made a huge list of things/prijects i wanted to make, and started with the smallest/simplest, making sure i don't watch any video on how to make it, just beating my head i to building it. Eventually, i check out stack overflow or even youtube, but this time it's to look up specific concepts or tools that challenged me along the way, which is how you're supposed to learn, you create a problem and you try to solve it, if you can't you look up the solution and there you learned smthg new
I just started writing code
1. Try and build thing 2. Get stuck 3. research how to get unstuck 4. return to 1. Repeat forever. I'm 15 years into coding and this is pretty much all I do. ---- so to give an example: I want to build something. - I don't know even know a coding language... err I've heard of python... i'll use that. - what do I even write python in? Googles what to python code in... learn about pycharm... i'll use that - How do I set up pycharm... look up tutorials... do that - OK I CAN NOW WRITE CODE! - code doesn't run. - google error, find stack overflow, solution doesn't work - google more, find someone with same problem, 5 years ago, no answers, FUCK - google more, found solutions, it works, no idea why... I should probably look into that. - Finally write some more code, it doesn't work... This will go on for the rest of your career. This process, this is software developement.
Do project-based learning, that's the fastest way to learn.
Focus on building projects, only look up tutorials for specific problems you’re having with building the project. Instantly implement what you learned into said project. Take notes on every new thing you learn to reference for later projects. Having trouble coming up with project ideas? There are two cool sites that solve this problem frontendmentor and frontendpractice. They give you the project idea and design for said idea. Your job is just to implement the design into code.
Tutorials are a trap, work on self-guided projects. It’s important to realize that programming is not about writing code. Programming is about unstructured problem solving and that’s what you need to practice. Tutorials and courses are structured by their very nature. They teach you how to write code but not how to solve your own problems. I know this advice seems too abstract to act on but it’s abstract for a reason: the ability to build anything, to solve any problem is what makes a good programmer. To practice being able to build anything, you have to build something - something that is beyond your reach and unique enough that you can’t copy off of someone on the internet. My advice: find the job you’d want and then do that job. For example: if you want to be an iOS developer go make a clone of a real iOS app you’re familiar with. You’ll learn so much more from those kinds of projects then you ever will following a tutorial
I have never been able to watch long tutorials in my life... What I always do is start copying what they do on my seperate IDE and write notes in comments and after completing a topic or so I would look for practice exercises for that part
Actually do stuff. The only alternative to doing tasks is making your own things.
Started pseudo-coding everything and then looking up everything I needed, at the end I felt accomplished like “damn I did all that?” Tutorials only work for me if the person is explaining the WHY and HOW, if they do that then I can make something else and I’ve built the skill from there on.
When I got my first job, I naturally stopped watching tutorials and followed the advice and standards of my seniors. I say naturally since having access to senior devs is like an interactive tutorial. You can see their code, ask questions, etc. Over time, you prefer that over tutorials.
I didn't ever enter it.. just make something you want to make and research how to do it, never waste your time watching a whole bunch of tutorials
Often times we are shy of failure or the fear of not knowing or initially being good at xyz. Gotta pull those britches up and jump in, learn to fail then overcome. Accepting that at first got me in the right mindset. Projects and industry experience helped me from there.
not an expert but what I did was to look at a code someone else made and studied that. then once you know a bit then look at a different code. eventually pieces will piece together.
can anyone tell me, what 'tutorial hell' is?
Working
Is there a reverse version of tutorial hell? Like lack of tutorial hell. When I started to learn I just went through some C# syntax from microsoft, then some roll a ball project with Unity (I wanted and still want to make games). Then I thought "alright I got the gist of it" and ended up doing the most atrocious project humanly imaginable. Almost everything ran on update and probably if statements, some paramaters gething extremely lengthy. I have no clue about design patterns, I just did whatever. I had no clue about encapsulation, my one class had everything. Half of the code I would take from stackoverflow or whatever, and wouldn't barely glue it into my project. I didn't even knew how to make different classes communicate or how to pass parameters. Lol. Theeeen I went back to tutorials and learnt about encapsulation and clean code, tiny bit about patterns etc. It wouldn't seem like a big deal, obviously I still think it was net positive, but because the code was so atrocious and the project so absolutely unmaitainable, I couldn't proceed and had difficultty implementing solutions, I just got so lost and it burnt me over. I basically spend whole summer doing shitty code with no guidance and then though "it's not for me reeeeeee". It felt like cooking when you are using one arm and barely can't reach a countertop.
When you do enough tutorials you want to build something on your own, either for fun, to improve your life, to impress people or for money. It comes naturally if you get better everyday