Tutorial Hell : A brief thoughtdump
tl;dr
Focus on learning and practicing, not just the completion of courses
Don't be afraid to skip parts of a course if it's too easy, don't be afraid to challenge yourself with extra research if a course isn't giving enough explanation, don't be afraid of dropping a resource when it's no longer relevant or helpful to you
Build small atomic projects to test new concepts you're learning
Use it or lose it! This goes with getting practice on new topics, and remembering to revisit your saved bookmarks! 🔖
thoughtdump
There's a big pitfall for consuming lots of tutorials and courses without building or practicing it. Nowadays, if I’m bored with the sludge of a tutorial, I just move on from it or skip around as I please. Don’t worry about 100% completing it. What’s the point?
(Disclaimer: It's still an amazing achievement to complete courses, it takes dedication, perseverance, and consistency! Personally, I've found myself beaten down by the expectation to complete things. So I find it helpful to let go of this kind of perfection)
Sometimes I find the best explanations on a stackoverflow post, in the source documentation, or on a niche developer’s blog.
The benefit of courses is the structure and the guaranteed coverage of topics in a field. So there’s that. Just gotta be intentional with it, and always connect what you’re learning with what you already know to make it sticky to your brain. Also, before buying any course, there's likely a free resource online that will do the trick! I find free courses in the most unexpected places, from youtube playlists, to github repos.
It’s much more engaging to learn something relevant to a problem you’re trying to solve as well, which leads to the epitome advice regarding tutorial hell..
"Quite Simply.. Build Projects"
The advice of simply “building projects” is thrown around a lot, but I think it’s important to build small, atomic, projects. Very small demos that test out just one concept you’re trying to hone down.
Sources of Inspiration
I recently got inspired by a collective named, SokPop. They are a game development studio that recently accomplished their goal of releasing 1 game a month for 100 months. That’s 100 games. Insane! I can only imagine how much you can learn from incrementally figuring out how to build different game mechanics. On a similar note, Jennifer Dewalt’s 100 websites in 100 days inspired me to build silly little websites to learn different web dev topics.
