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Tutorial hell vs building stuff, the 6 month test
I spent my first 4 months watching Python tutorials and copying every example. Felt productive but I couldn't write a single script from scratch. Then I forced myself to build a tiny expense tracker with just a CSV file and a few functions. Took me 3 weekends and tons of googling, but I learned more than those 4 months combined. The bugs I hit taught me how to debug by reading error messages instead of rewatching videos. Now I only watch a tutorial when I'm stuck on a specific line of code. Has anyone else found that their first real project was worth way more than all the courses?
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tyler_hall921d ago
Yes!! This is exactly what happened to me with JavaScript. I watched like 60 hours of courses and still couldn't build anything without following along step by step. Then I made a dumb little to-do list app and spent two whole days just figuring out why my buttons weren't working, turned out I had a typo in a function name the whole time. That one dumb bug taught me more about reading errors and checking my own code than any video ever did. Tutorials make you feel smart because everything works when someone else writes it, but you don't learn to think through problems that way. Now I build first and only look stuff up when I'm actually stuck on something real.
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