Escape Tutorial Hell & Utilize Them In A Better Way

[Music] this video is sponsored by lenôtre what technology stack you build on the node makes it easy for both beginners and power users to host apps sites and projects in the cloud to get $20 towards your new account visit Llano comm / travis e hey what's going on guys so in this video I want to talk a little bit about escaping tutorial hell or tutorial purgatory and if you've never heard that expression it's basically where you're learning to code and you become super dependent on watching either YouTube tutorials or online courses whatever it might be and then you go to create something on your own and you're completely lost and you don't even know where to start so I'm just gonna kind of share my experience with you and what prompted me to make this video is you know I get a lot of requests to look at at portfolios and resumes and stuff like that and I looked at one a few days ago and three of the four projects were from my YouTube channel we're from like they were like small projects that I did on my channel and you know I have to be honest with the guys so I said I don't I don't mean to be harsh but you know it's not it's not gonna benefit you to just do tutorials and put them on your resume or in your portfolio and then send them off to employers and it's not about me caring I mean you guys are free to do that if you want I just I wouldn't recommend it or at least the project without changing it or you know adding to it or whatever and there's a few reasons one is because they could be recognized especially if it's from like a udemy course a popular udemy course over and over I've seen like cold steel projects Stephan grind or projects my own projects on people's portfolios unchanged and I you know that they can recognize that because they see so many different projects so that's one reason but the more important reason is because you need that experience of building stuff on your own following a tutorial is only half the battle so searching things looking things up you know testing things out debugging that that's the other half and that's really important and you only get that from building your own projects so what I suggest doing when you watch a tutorial or a course is deconstruct it deconstruct the the concepts of the project so if you watch a to-do list how to build a to-do list with react or a Django or whatever whatever it might be it could be anything at all it's not about building the stupid to-do list it's about what you learn while you're building it so write down the concepts you're gonna learn how to connect to a database you're gonna learn most likely some kind of abstraction layer you know mongoose equalised something like that or even straight SQL queries you're gonna learn how to structure the application you're gonna learn how to create the UI how to connect the UI to the backend maybe even host it some tutorials you know have hosting involved so there's a lot of things you're gonna learn a lot of valuable things can be learned from a to-do list app but if you look at it from the point of I'm gonna build a to-do list it's you know it's it doesn't benefit you that much and a huge mistake that people make is they just watch it build the to-do list and then they stop and move on to the next one and you know that might be good for me for ad revenue because you're just watching video after video but I wouldn't suggest doing that I would suggest watching it really understanding it going through the whole thing and then taking those concepts that you learned in building something else from it okay start over create a brand new folder build something different if it's to do to-do list app that you watched build workout tracker you know so you have different data different data types maybe even switch up the database or something like that you're going to have a different UI if you use bootstrap in the tutorial don't use it here there's a lot of things you can do to change it and make it a completely different project maybe connect to find some kind of workout API that you can bring in maybe add often occation and this brings me to my next point which is combining tutorials so you might want to take this workout tracker that you build from the console of the to-do list and then watch another tutorial on authentication maybe Jason web token sessions whatever it might be Oh auth and then you know do that tutorial and then integrate it into your workout trainer workout tracker application so that way you you're building on to this this app that is yours but you you know you learn those concepts from the tutorial and you know that's really the best advice that I can give and that's that's what has helped me out is building my own stuff based off what I learned from other courses and tutorials the goal is never to stop watching tutorials it's just to make them more efficient in in your learning at least you know in my opinion so another thing you can do to kind of break out of tutorial hell is to look at other people's code so tutorials are one thing because they you know they have hand-holding and basically showing you what everything is and all that but if you look at someone else's code on github that is you know something that is what you're into or learning react or whatever it might be and you go through it and you really try to understand it look at lines of code and Google certain methods that you don't understand figure it out figure out how it works that I think is gives you some really good experience like real life experience because when you get a job you're gonna get code bases thrown at you that you have to comb through and you know whether it's add a feature or debug or fix issues or whatever it might be this gives you some real-world experience other than just following a tutorial so I would definitely recommend just going on github looking for certain projects and just looking at the code alright and that brings me to the next one which is contributing to open source which is also a very good idea to kind of break out a tutorial hell and have you do something that is really productive on your own and you know it could be the code that you've been looking at trying to understand maybe you see somewhere where you could add a feature or maybe you can look at the issues and find some issue to fix and make a pull request and even if your pull request gets tonight that's that's fine at least you have the experience of actually diving in and trying to do something add something of your own and submitting it at least you have that experience another tip that I have is to stick with a certain set of technologies stick with a stack I mean there's certain things that you just have to learn like get you know how to you know a text editor you need to learn but when you choose a language framework stuff like that stick with it don't bounce around unless you're just just starting like if you are trying to figure out if you want to work with react angular or view it's fine to watch you know watch all three of my crash course is no it's fine to just kind of skip around a little bit then but once you really find out what you want to do what what is easiest for you stick with it you know you don't have to watch every crash course that I or anyone else releases and I think that that really overwhelms people they think that they have to watch every single video and they have to learn every single technology that someone like me puts out and it's just not true you don't have to you want to stick with you know what you want to do for if you want to just do it for fun or whatever that's fine but don't get overwhelmed about learning I don't know webassembly or something like that that you're not gonna be using in your career just do that maybe on the weekend for fun or whatever you know on the side so definitely stick with a stack another thing I would suggest doing is algorithms and challenges and it might not seem productive I've worked for a company but I also come from mostly from the freelancing world and you know having my own business so any of you guys that are freelancers you know that your time is precious and doing algorithms just seemed like a complete waste of time to me for a long time back you know years ago but I've realized that it's basically like doing push-ups for your mind you know and it helps you solve problems faster it helps you learn syntax and learn different methods that you might not have known about and just it makes you a better programmer which in turn allows you to be more productive and do things faster and better you know write better code and just you know be a better developer so I would definitely suggest that in 2020 I'm basically I'm gonna be adding I don't know if I'm gonna do a series or whatever but I'm gonna do more fundamentals challenges algorithms data structures stuff like that you know in addition to frameworks and all that stuff so that's something I plan on doing another thing I would suggest doing is is joining a community and this could be either in real life or online I know it's programmers or a lot of us are very antisocial including myself but you might want to go to a meet-up you know those join a meet-up meet people talking about programming and technology that's gonna help you break out a tutorial hell if you want to do stuff online you have discord slack there's forums you can join the free code camp forum is great even in YouTube comments you know just interacting with people i discord server called the developer hangout a few years ago which I don't really go into much anymore just because I'm so busy but there's a lot of help there if you you know if you get stuck people can help you out you can get ideas from there people post their projects you can look at so I think that joining an online community can can really benefit you you also want to use other resources specifically documentation courses go out of date very quickly and as a content creator it's very frustrating because you know we spend all this time creating a course and then a week later react updates or something and things get deprecated and people complain and leave bad reviews but I mean I'm not gonna rant on that but my point is that frameworks and languages and whatever they update and the documentation is always gonna be your most accurate source I'm not gonna say it's the best because some documentation really really sucks some of it isn't even worth it but for the most part you know it's gonna have the most up-to-date information so you always want to be friendly with the documentation in addition to tutorials and then the last one I have is just start working and I know that's easier said than done this is the basically the last step you know you're gonna have to do a lot more before you actually start working but when you start working you're going to be pulled out a tutorial hell whether you like it or not because there's no tutorial to follow anymore you're gonna get your requirements that you have to do and you're gonna have to figure it out and that's why I said you know you want to build your own projects you want to look at other people's code contribute to open source everything that I've said up up to this point is to prepare you for that real-world experience as a programmer because you're going to be doing a lot of research you're gonna be dealing with a team so that's why I said join a community everything that I've said is to prepare you for getting that job and not being completely overwhelmed and you know having horrible impostor syndrome and stuff like that because I mean that happens to a lot of us including myself so that's it guys hopefully you enjoyed this and took something from it I'm just trying to share kind of my experience and what's helped me out and hopefully I can help a few people out so that's it thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Traversy Media

Views: 177,813

Rating: 4.9836388 out of 5

Keywords: development, programming, programming tutorial

Id: g_aMpyMvQ9k

Length: 12min 19sec (739 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 11 2019