How To Escape Tutorial Hell (For Developers)

tutorial hell did you know 95 of aspiring developers are stuck in tutorial hell i have no idea if that's true or not but i am telling you this holds so many aspiring developers back it is crucial that you don't get stuck here anyways we're gonna be diving into that today uh for those that are new welcome to our web development podcast where we help with sparing developers good jobs engineer developers grow kinda i don't know i've been saying that so long essentially we just help aspiring developers navigate through all the [ __ ] that's it uh yep it's after 30 seconds so i can cuss all right cool so tutorial hell is a spot that a lot of people don't even recognize during i would argue a good chunk of people when they come to me they're often struggling with being able to build stuff so they've gone through these courses and spent months going through these long courses taught them so much syntax and programming concepts and how to build stuff right you just learned how to build that navigation you just learned how to build that hero image and like position stuff and build some interactivity with them even like you went through tutorials that taught you how to put up a server right you could even build your own api amazing stuff right and then you know you're following along with the tutorial and you try to build your own project and you get past the hump of like okay what do i even build right but then you finally you're like i've always want to build this you know what i'm gonna try it with what i just learned and then blank nothing you it's like you didn't learn anything how frustrating is it to spend so much time especially like when you hold a full-time job you're doing this on the side you spend so much time and then you go to build something and nothing comes out i'm telling you i've been there i've been pissed off at it and i'm like i've even thought like is this for me i cannot believe that i can't take what i just learned and build something out what the hell just happened right the problem is people okay software engineering is so weird if you are someone that was successful in traditional education and you are used to going to a classroom and you are used to getting assigned assignments and going through lectures and then getting tested on it and then you know learning new concepts and remembering that and using note cards to remember that and try to reinforce that in your memory and then getting tested on that for your final quiz or your final paper whatever it is and then you do that you get an a b c d or if you're like me and f in some cases in traditional education because [ __ ] traditional education toss all of that to the side right you don't need that anymore you don't need that style anymore you have not even trained for what it takes to be a software engineer but you have to understand that you have to toss that aside and you have to realize that learning how to code is going to be a very different experience there's no test at the end there's no tests at the end and people like creating note cards for becoming a developer and trying to understand concepts i'm telling you it's like fine if you want to do that at a very fundamental and basic level to remember like really simple concepts fine but you have to you have to take that knowledge and you have to implement it you have to reinforce it and we're going to talk about a few different ways to reinforce that knowledge but you're not the goal isn't to remember everything it's not it's to literally learn some stuff get your hands dirty and so i'm gonna tell you something that like really throws people off if you've spent an hour learning something uh on a course you should be building something to reinforce it literally just an hour you're learning some syntax you need to toss that course aside when you're done with that module or whatever and then build something with it right you need to try it you have to and it happens that early and first i'm telling you so many people maybe you're this person you tell me if you are in the comments if you're on youtube whatever um if you are spending weeks months without building anything on the side you are wasting so much time that knowledge isn't going to stick unless you implement unless you apply it in a different way unless you apply it to an actual problem unless you build something that kind of makes sense something tangible even if it's like a tiny little feature of a website that you use constantly right so for example let's say you're just learning basic positioning um maybe like you're a big fan of twitter and maybe you just build what a tweet is right you have a little little div and you have little divs inside of it that have different information right and you build that out you implement it so what your tutorial said to do who cares way too many people get caught up like what should i build right but try to relate it to features like when you learn positioning you're like okay i've used what hundreds of websites that have used different positioning techniques with css on it like let's take like a really small piece of that so i don't feel overwhelmed i'm going to build it right it doesn't have to be perfect you don't need to feed it with back end data et cetera like obviously those applications are big those features are big just like try to break it down into the simple aspects right it's gonna have a little front end little html and css and you're gonna have some text maybe a button right that's huge if you can build something on the site a little feature on the site and reinforce that module that one hour module that just talked about positioning that's huge and if you didn't learn how to color the text yet fine don't color it if you didn't learn how to um you didn't learn like the proper way to center it i don't give a [ __ ] just center it center it the way that you just learned right you're going to learn different way centering is going to be fun if you haven't even learned that they're it's it's it's fun just frustrating slash fun so but i think people need to break out of a good course so here's the thing a good course when you go through it you spend an hour in it and you feel good about it you feel like you're learning you're passing the challenges a good course will make you feel like you're remembering it a good course will push you along and a good course should but where a lot of courses lack is it's just one way of running that through your head to be able to understand it you need to basically understand what you just learned and apply it to like five different situations five different types of features and it's really gonna help reinforce it so think about like small things that you could build again try to relate simplify these large applications and think how is positioning how can i practice positioning with this tiny little feature right start trying to train your mind to do that it's not going to happen right away but the the faster you can do that the faster you compare it with your course that's phenomenal there are other strategies i'm not a huge fan of no cards i don't think remembering specific syntax is helpful i don't think like remembering syntax that's actually the easy part being able to create implementations and understand the problem you're creating and even focus on the efficiency and the structure of your implementation those are harder concepts that are going to take a while to learn like just remembering the syntax you'll eventually remember it stop trying to remember the exact syntax it's irrelevant especially in the beginning you will pick it up through repetition but also one thing you can do is when you're practicing that feature a really cool thing you could do well so you from your course you can even say okay um this is where like you hear about this imaginary duck thing you buy one actually yes buy an imaginary duck i've been wanting to create imaginary not imagine okay buy a rubber duck a real rubber duck i will eventually sell them with my logo on it okay listen if i'm giving you money i want some or if i'm giving you advice i want some money for it right but for now it's free buy someone else's rubber duck you put it aside you learn that module you you basically you learn some of the concepts that you are going to have to apply now but even before you apply it try to explain it to this rubber duck it's a rubber duck's dumb sword of duck has no idea what you're about to teach it right it sounds silly i'm telling you do it look that rubber duck in the eye and you explain how frustrating positioning things with float floats are and why it's frustrating and even going through the concept of trying to explain like okay here's what floats are used for and here's where they start breaking down and here's where you know like some of the bugs that can happen and you could even think back like okay this module showed me the proper way to use a float the improper way to use a flow and like try to explain what you just learned to that rubber duck that's you're training your mind to start applying what you just learned in a slightly different context actually a slightly more complex context getting your mind trained to be able to kind of just toss that concept around in your head in just different ways look at it in different ways look at it in different angles try to teach that rubber duck which is very different than you learning the concept it starts training your mind to start essentially using that concept and implementing it in a slightly different way and when you start training your mind to think about things in a more complex manner and apply it to specific situations teaching that rubber duck is a different situation it's going to help solidify that concept right so you just taught it to that rubber duck and you're like you know what all right don told me to build this really really simple feature you know i'm going to take uh with floats i'm actually that twitter card or whatever i'm gonna go ahead and position things with floats we're gonna see what happens right we're gonna break stuff it's okay if you break stuff and so then you apply floats to that tiny little feature that you're building out you code it out right and if you have to look stuff up here's the key thing if you have to look stuff up that's okay that's normal i am telling you you're not trying to remember this stuff it will get reinforced in time give yourself time if you have to look stuff up try to avoid going back to that tutorial and look up api documentation for it right so what api documentation exists that talks about how to use floats look that up just something different than your course and here's also another neat thing when you start going through like different courses that'll explain a concept in a different way sometimes there are certain courses that will explain it in a way that resonates with you and then sometimes you're just like i don't get asynchronous behavior like what the hell is happening here i get lost i'm telling you i am someone that got lost with asynchronous behavior um actually i'm gonna give a yeah we're gonna go down this road i got lost with asynchronous behavior it was kind of confusing it was floating around in my head and it took a long time to grab it but what really threw me off was promises and javascript what the [ __ ] is happening in promises i i feel like it threw me off for so long and it was so i would go through different um educational material to try to understand them they would even explain it in a different way and um then i we were it was in a coding bootcamp and we were explained it in a couple different ways and like i think i started getting it in the last portion but i still like i went through courses and it helped i supplemented i supplemented with more and more education and then i even tried to apply it and then i still blanked i i was getting closer so it's just trial and error and then i would go back i would learn like a different resource or supplementational resource to try to understand it i'd get a little bit further i'd understand it a little bit more and then you know i would get stuck and then then i remember we built a promise library we built a really really basic version of a promise library it sounds really weird to say okay i don't understand promises so i'm going to build an entire promise library like how the hell am i supposed to do that but when you really simplify that down and you go like when you look at everything that um when you look at how a promised library is built and you understand the basic concepts of that and you try to rebuild that thing to understand like what's happening under the hood right so maybe you're just doing it with asynchronous calls and you really dumb it down and simplify it down and you build your own promise method that is it's forcing you to think about what you're doing you're essentially breaking down this really advanced concept into smaller [Applause] smaller concepts that you can understand a little bit better it's a really like if you're really stuck and you've gone through multiple resources you try to code it out like try to build a basic version of it like for example react virtual dom what the hell is going on with a virtual dime it is so confusing at first it's so confusing at first but one strategy we did is like you know we went through jquery we picked it up and you you could do this with vanilla javascript for people that are like hardcore vanilla javascript sure whatever um but we rebuilt a very basic version of the virtual dom that would update in similar ways that the virtual dom would build right and so we broke down we're like okay reacts is really scary monster it's like very scary stuff and complex stuff i'm never gonna understand it so we took a piece of that that's still very complicated and then we tried to rebuild it and we had to break it down into all of its small parts and really understand how that virtual dom worked i'm telling you whenever i would get stuck with super advanced concepts that got me through it and now things started to click and they don't there's not this giant light bulb that just brightens up your whole uh vision and you're like i got it right it's a little light bulb you're not aiming for these big leaps of like oh i understand everything about promises now i understand everything about positioning now et cetera it's little leaps it's little wins and you have to recognize those little wins and sometimes it helps just to look at your code a month ago are there any like when you look at what so you're progressively going to build more complex projects and when you go back to one of your first projects look at your code and just think is there anything that i would change would i do things differently and if the answer is yes and you're like i actually would probably change this or i would build this function in a different way that's huge that's growth and i think sometimes people start losing um they start losing the ability or they never really built it up but you have to develop the ability to analyze your growth as a software engineer because let's face it this is a long journey it's frustrating and if you feel like you're just spinning your wheels and nothing's happening you're not making progress it's discouraging it's i want to do a video on motivation with software engineers um i'm going to give you a heads up the thumbnail is probably going to be [ __ ] your motivation and that's going to be an interesting conversation but you have to i'm telling you almost no one is going to become a software engineer without seeing progress being made it's frustrating i'm sure you've experienced it especially people coming out of a coding bootcamp and you're like i learned all this stuff right but now i'm trying to build my own stuff and it's not really first of all when you come out of a coding bootcamp you're going to get that it's going to take a while for things to solidify but even the self-taught path you have to analyze your own code and you have to be patient with yourself you have to be patient with yourself and if one way of learning something doesn't work try another way try sometimes it's even switching to a book that can help teach you sometimes it's switching to a video you don't like the text you want to switch to video and someone explaining it to you in your own way that's the thing i used to think like there are so many courses if i created a course no one would want to view it my perspective has definitely changed and i think sometimes you just have to find the creator the author of that course that they teach it in a way where you kind of just get and sometimes it takes some searching so for people feeling discouraged like you're going to these courses you're like maybe this isn't for me i'm telling you pretty much every developer has felt that at some point and there are so many different methods to get past that and so i highly i highly recommend you you as soon as you can start building your own projects so there's this i kind of talked about being able to apply what you're learning in different ways and a lot of times it's just implementing implementing it's coding it's building features building another feature that uses it building another feature that uses this loop building another feature that uses this loop right and it's through a lot of repetition through solving different problems but also as a software engineer you are 100 a problem solver you are a lot of software engineers avoid this a lot of software engineers just want to code and you know they want to like develop more efficient algorithms etc i don't care what position you are at you are going to be a problem solver first you your opinions about how to solve the problem before even technology gets introduced matter and i think software engineers need to start thinking about this stuff because a huge question mark in people's heads is how do i figure out what to build again that's going to come with time i gave you a recommendation previously to do it but like you have to start training yourself to identify problems that exist another strategy i highly recommend if you're going through courses and you're starting to think okay what do i need to build what do i want to build what's going to help reinforce what i'm learning think about your old industry think about the problems that existed in your old industry think about the crappy you know what shitty software that you used at frustrated you and made your job twice is worse think about that software like really feel it think about the offer feel some hate feel some hate motivation no don't don't hate them but like i'm i'm serious think about that software that sucked or that software that you wanted can you build that software you're now learning tons of skills you're learning tons of technical skills to be able to create solutions that solve real problems you have so many opportunities to look in your past you have so many opportunities to look at other applications and what exists like a lot of you are probably on social media you're constantly seeing people complain about things and building new things and coming up with new ideas and getting frustrated because these uh certain ideas don't exist right if you aren't connect with people on tech on twitter and hear what they're talking about hear what they're kind of curious of building and like i wish i had this tool etc just get more involved in the developer community and just like even businesses in general you know when you become a professional developer you're probably going to be building tools for businesses um get yourself trained to be able to identify that and then sometimes it takes you got to make a little bit of progress with your courses to know what you can do with code and what tech can do in general sometimes there's more generic videos that can showcase that and eventually eventually you're going to have these kind of abstract ideas that like you don't you don't even know if you can create an application for it you don't know if it exists or what it would look like or how you would code it and then you start progressively getting better with your courses and eventually this comes together eventually you start learning enough to at least build a feature a subset of this software you wish you had in your old industry you're like okay that was actually easier than i thought i struggled with it but i eventually built a small little feature what else could i build let's start breaking this giant application down that i that all of a sudden doesn't seem so abstract now that i have more technical knowledge i'm like i actually i can think of a solution for it uh i can think about like a really cool feature that i wish i would have had in my old industry what i'm telling you i feel like i've told a lot of aspiring developers and a lot of aspiring developers feel discouraged because things don't click right away things don't it takes a while for things to click and they struggle with implementation especially the first time that they try it and i think you need to really be patient give yourself time break things down into smaller components of the ultimate thing that you're trying to build and sometimes it's just diving into different types of courses that are going to teach things in a different way picking up a book instead you know building that software uh from the ground up and like really breaking that that software down or like if you're trying to learn a certain type of concept that's really advanced breaking that advanced concept up and maybe building a few functions that are going to do what this function ultimately does and just trade in your mind to think about things in a slightly different way so tutorial hell is really easy to escape if you've been trapped in it for a long time sometimes that means you know you got to go back and learn some fundamentals sometimes that means you got to go back to your course and try to pair some projects with some of that material but it's easily escapable and i think a lot of people overwhelm themselves and they get down on themselves and they make themselves feel like they're not intelligent enough not capable enough to to build real software that companies are going to pay them for i had those feelings i almost gave up because of those feelings and i'm telling you i'm laughing right now because i was so [ __ ] stupid i had no idea what i was talking about i had no idea i i can't believe i've been humored these self-defeating thoughts like in the moment it can feel very discouraging as a professional developer with some experience behind me i'm telling those were just self-defeating thoughts that i just had a okay got it i'm gonna move past that thought i'm gonna keep going eventually this is gonna click and it does it does eventually click but you have to do project work you have to build stuff you have to have to have to build stuff and that's where people get trapped that's where people get trapped i think that's all i want to say about um tutorial hell i've talked about it different um aspects but it's a mindset thing because i think eventually you do escape it and you get more comfortable you get more confident with what you can build it's literally just pushing forward and just building projects and making sure that you're pairing actual implementation with your courses that's it it's really simple it's not necessarily easy but it is simple and it's a mindset shift give yourself enough time to start letting that mindset in agree and listen to this video again um if you want to listen to this video or listen to the audio again to just when you start feeling down do it but yeah that's it that's all i had to say about uh tutorial health for now i think it's it's pretty simple everyone's gonna have a different unique situation um if you want if you have questions more questions about it we can do more videos on this that's fine that's fine i'm always happy to dive into kind of these like mindset soft skill stuff um but yeah let me know what you think in the comments and if you haven't already feel free to join our junior friendly discord community um yeah the link is in the description and i always forget everything i'm supposed to tag at the end i don't know join our discord community we'd love to have you um but yeah that's it i'll see you in the next episode [Music]

Channel: DonTheDeveloper

Views: 24,177

Keywords: tutorial hell, web development, how to escape tutorial hell, how to get out of tutorial hell, web development tutorial hell, what is tutorial hell, stop watching coding tutorials, how to get out of tutorial hell programming, web development podcast, donthedeveloper podcast, donthedeveloper, don the developer

Id: soKbZXp_eC0

Length: 23min 51sec (1431 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 27 2022