Are You Making This Mistake? (Learning Programming)

hey everybody I'm Andy I'm a self-taught software developer and in today's video I'm gonna cover the topic of tutorial purgatory now before I dive into the topic of tutorial purgatory I just wanted to let you know that I am going to be making a big announcement the next two or three weeks I can't say too much about it right now I'm actually a hard at work at the thing that I'm going to announce so just keep your eyes peeled if you follow me on Twitter if you are if you if you like my facebook page you should get the announcements as soon as they come out all right so what is tutorial purgatory this phenomena of tutorial purgatory is something that I've observed in people through YouTube interactions meaning people who have commented on my channels and just in general and people who are self studying and going to classical education or I've sort of notice this this happening tutorial purgatory to me is someone who is stuck in this and the cycle of finding courses on udemy or free code Academy that I don't even know all the different platforms that you can take courses on now but someone who is just taking course after course after course and months and months in they are just taking courses and maybe they quit because they took all the courses and they didn't become software developers or they're in that process now but their motivation and effort is waning because they just don't understand why all the tutorials they're taking is not leading them to where they want to go and what's crazy to me is that people who do this people who take just you know dozens and dozens of courses are actually in the right mindset to a certain degree because in their head they're relating education meaning if I just add up all this information in my head that one day I'll wake up and with enough courses taken with enough books read that I will just wake up and be a software developer and you know like maybe they're thinking like after 40 courses I'll wake up and click BAM boom you are a software developer and suddenly people are banging down your door asking you to come work for them but clearly that's not how it is become a software developer when you are going the self-taught route or you don't have any experience it takes a different strategy than just taking courses because you need to figure out when your skills are ready you need to figure out when you're gonna start applying for a job you need to figure out then how to show off your skills right you need to figure out what you're going to you're gonna have to create a portfolio of applications and how is that gonna show off your skills what type of job are you going for these are all really really important questions that you need to answer and I'll talk about that in a second all right so the real question is are you in tutorial purgatory well first I think it's pretty obvious are you watching a lot of tutorials that could be a first hint that you're in tutorial purgatory but it just watching tutorials alone is certainly not evidence that you're in tutorial purgatory I am a big fan of the head first series of books and I read every single one that I could get my hands on I read the JavaScript head first book HTML and CSS and c-sharp before I became a developer and they were really instrumental in helping me to get the fundamentals of each of those programming languages down so it doesn't mean that you're in purgatory if you're taking a lot of tutorials you may be in tutorial purgatory if you are watching a lot of tutorials and you don't have a clear plan of where you want to go so have you written down a plan do you know where you want to go obviously when you're first starting out you are maybe open to a lot of possibilities but have you even sort of written down a rough idea or a rough vision of what you want for an end goal is it freelancing is that full-time work is it front-end back-end if you haven't done that it there's a possibility you could be just sort of floating around and not having a clear goal of what you're shooting at have you brainstormed about your future resume or have you brainstormed about what applications you want to build if you haven't even build your first sort of portfolio application yet that might be a sign that you're doing too many tutorials may not and may if you've been doing this for four months and you haven't even built your first application in a programming language that may be a sign that you are in tutorial purgatory and you're just looking to keep learning and learning through tutorials when you actually should be building an application again these are not signs you're not definite science they're just sort of questions that you should ask yourself and start to think about like do you have a plan do you have applications in the pipeline are you building applications now and those are the things that are really important so if after hearing all this you take a look around you see yeah and pretty much in tutorial purgatory I don't have a plan I haven't built any major portfolios from application I don't know where I'm going I'm feeling directionless there is a way out and let's dive into exactly what that will look like for one the most important thing you want to do is create a game plan and what I mean by a credit game plan is you want to work backwards from what your end goal is so I know that you probably have an idea in your head of becoming a software developer now that's a goal that you have in mind and that's a great goal but it needs to be as specific as possible otherwise it's hard to sort of work backwards from a non-specific goal so do a little bit of brainstorming figure out exactly what type of developer you want to be is it front-end back-end figure out what programming languages you won't learn and that way you can have a better sense of what exactly you need to cover in terms of your education you need to learn JavaScript you need learn Python you need to learn front-end frameworks that may not come up and may not be part of your education plan per se but it may be it's impossible to say unless you know where you're going and what direction you're pointed in once you create that vision of what you want then you should think about what your future resume will look like right so so go to the future sort of imagine that day one when you're gonna start shooting at your resume what does that resume have on it are you going to highlight your portfolio applications are you going what are those before the applications going to have in them or they're gonna what programming languages are they going to display what skills are they gonna show off and they're gonna show your ability to write unit tests maybe work with external integrations maybe work with databases maybe work with front and back-end you have to think about this stuff and it doesn't mean you have to come up with the right answers right now but you need to build some sort of loose framework that is fluid enough that you can change it but again if you are not pointing in any direction meaning if you don't even have a rough outline of where you want to go then it's hard to not just sort of float around like a ship without a a sail right you're just gonna drift around and then go wherever the current is going to go so figure out where you want to go create a vision of where you want to go figure out what you want your future resume to look like and then once you have that then you can figure out whether it's appropriate to be doing a lot of tutorials right like if you're trying to learn a new programming language that's a great time to do a lot of tutorials or whether maybe you should be shifting your time to be spent more on building applications now there's no right answer the only way to know whether that's the right answer is to look at your game plan if you already know the basics of JavaScript and you have a future goal of having one JavaScript app that's pretty complex then you should be working on that it's pretty simple to me it's not really rocket science it's just do you have a game plan if you don't create a game plan figure out what you want for the future and then at all times reference that roadmap that blueprint as you go along to figure out what you need to be doing that way there's no ambiguity you're never waking up in the morning and going hmm what should I do today you just look at the blueprint and from there it should give you guide you and give you a laser focus all right so I hope the video was helpful tutorial purgatory is a real thing and I hope people I help people get out of it because it can lead you down the wrong path and obviously make you Peter off and eventually quit something real altogether because you're like I I never I never had it in me to begin with and that's just not true if you really enjoy software development if you've enjoyed the tutorial tutorials they've been doing that for thus far I think you should continue doing it just make sure you have a little structure in place anyhow go ahead and leave a like if you liked the video go ahead and click subscribe and click the bell icon if you want to get notifications in the future anytime I put out future videos other than that thank you so much for watching and peace out guys

Channel: Andy Sterkowitz

Views: 242,044

Rating: 4.9228706 out of 5

Keywords: learning programming, programming for beginners, self taught software developer, learning programming for beginners, becoming a software developer

Id: MxxAc9a4ILU

Length: 8min 20sec (500 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 26 2018