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If You Want to Learn Better, Put Down the Tutorial, and Start Practicing by@diegoballesteros
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If You Want to Learn Better, Put Down the Tutorial, and Start Practicing
by Diego BallesterosApril 2nd, 2022
Too Long; Didn't Read
Introduction So how do we escape tutorial hell? Well, I should start from the very beginning. In the first part of this series, I reported that I did 20 coffee chats over one weekend. Since then I’ve been doing a similar number of coffee chats every weekend. I am now at a total of over 50 coffee chats! That’s a whole lot of coffee.People Mentioned
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Introduction
So how do we escape tutorial hell?
Well, I should start from the very beginning.
That’s a whole lot of coffee.
Many may be asking why did I decide to do so many? Well, when I was learning how to code and program I was essentially self-taught and I had no mentors during that period.
Tutorial Hell
One of the most common questions I received during the coffee chats is:
If there was one thing you could change about your journey, what would it be?
-- Coffee chatters
Now don’t get me wrong, these can all be great resources, but doing this constant jumping around can be known as tutorial hell. Finishing one tutorial or resource and hopping on into the next.
At the end of every single one of them, I never felt like I truly grasped the concepts I needed. So why did I keep jumping around?
I felt like whether it was HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or React that there was always something more to learn. I wanted to fill in every gap of knowledge to be prepared for my first future job.
The 100% Fallacy
Going from tutorial to tutorial to achieve this imaginary 100% knowledge of a topic is very detrimental.
The reality is that reaching 100% learning with any of the topics is near impossible! This is the 100% fallacy. There will always be something more to learn.
But, then if 100% can’t be reached what’s the goal?
The goal isn’t to be the most knowledgeable person in HTML, CSS, JS, or anything else. The real goal is to be a developer. Once I realized this it became obvious what the next step was.
Escaping Tutorial Hell
The real solution is putting the skills learned from one tutorial, Bootcamp, etc into action.
“Practice makes perfect.”
The meaningful learning, in my humble opinion, will always come when actually sitting down, opening up visual studio code and trying to code something, breaking it, and doing it all over again. Even if you have no novel idea it doesn’t matter! Cloning something for the purpose of learning is completely valid.
I felt like I gained the skills necessary for my first job. Just as a side note this project remained private and not commercial as I obviously don’t own any rights to Twitter.
Conclusion
Although, it’s something that’s probably been said before, but I think it’s worth mentioning again.
If you want to get good at weightlifting, then you lift. If you want to get good at swimming, then you swim. If you want to get good at coding, then you code.
No amount of tutorials will change this. So before opening up that next youtube video or possibly buying yet another Udemy course on the same topic, I urge you to consider just sitting down and coding something, anything.
If you have any other tips for escaping tutorial hell let me know in the comments below!
***Originally published at [//relatablecode.com ](//relatablecode.com/how-to-escape-tutorial-hell-the-100-fallacy/)on March 13, 2022.***
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