A common new developer mistake: Tutorial hell
If you’re learning development, you’ll watch a lot of videos and read a lot of articles. Even if you’re in college or university like I am, this is true. Today, I’d like to discuss a common mistake a lot of us make, tutorial hell.
Tutorial hell is when you’re watching too many videos but not doing enough practice. Assume that you’re watching a great tutorial series on inheritance in C#, you might think that you actually understood the concept and you might even be able to explain what exactly the video is talking about at the time you’re watching it. However, there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to remember everything the next day and there’s even less chance you’ll be able to remember everything a month later.
There’s no real reason to be afraid though. We’ve all been there at one point or another. I suffered from it too. When I first started learning web development, I bought a bunch of courses on Udemy(most of which were teaching outdated concepts and wasting my time — but that’s an article for another day) and all I did was watch and watch some more. Some of these tutorials will try to convince you that you’ll learn as long as you code along with them but the reality is you’ll just learn how to code exactly like them. The video might teach you how to write your own blog software using a bunch of fancy technologies but you won’t know how to make a chat app using the same technologies unless you understand what’s happening behind the scenes and that’s only possible if you practice what you’re learning outside the tutorials. Learning how to code is a time-consuming process and it’s completely fine. I’d suggest that you practice everything as you continue to learn. Here are a few tips on how you can practice your newly learned skills:
- Start blogging: This might sound like a silly idea to you but it’s actually a great way to practice. As a blog writer, you’ll have to write articles on whatever you’ve learned using your own words and I don’t think I have to explain why that is great for practicing.
- Start a YouTube channel: This ties in with my previous point. Starting a YouTube channel where you talk about your newly learned skill is a great way of practicing the said skill.
- Use it: Okay, this is the most obvious one. Assume that you learned strings in JavaScript today. Boot up your favorite IDE and start coding. Get your hands dirty and write some code that involves strings in JavaScript. Do some experiments and test your limits on your newly learned skill. Believe me, there isn’t a better way to learn than doing it on your own and seeing the results over and over again.
- Work on a project using your newly learned skill: Okay, now that you got your hands dirty, you can use whatever you learned on a project. This will allow you to learn more about the real-life use of your newly learned skill.
Tutorial hell can be demotivating if you’re stuck in a learning loop. You’ll feel like you’re trying your best to learn but it simply doesn’t click. You’ll feel like you’re wasting your time and others are clearly smarter than you when that’s not really the case. Others are simply practicing more than you are(or have better practicing habits such as using their newly learned knowledge somewhere). Sometimes we need more time to learn than others due to various factors such as our background and that’s completely fine. After each tutorial you read or watch, give yourself some time to practice and you’ll find that you’re learning a lot faster than before. The idea isn’t to speedrun every tutorial you can find and take notes before moving on to the next one. Learning a programming language isn’t about memorizing the syntax or reading up on what a certain function does, it’s about learning what’s happening under the hood and what the logic behind everything is.
This article is way out of the scope of what I’ve written so far but I feel like talking about a common learning mistake is as important as introducing people to the basics of web development. Before I end this article, I want to leave you with a quick CSS tip as a “thank you” for making it this far.
We all know media queries and some of us even hate them. Why do I have to write multiple media queries for the same element? Well, CSS has a function called clamp and it clamps a value between an upper and a lower bound. The function accepts 3 values; a minimum value, a preferred value, and a maximum value. Let’s assume that I have a div with a red background color and it takes up 50% of the viewport and I want it to be at least 150px wide and at most 800px wide. I’d have to simply write width: clamp(150px, 50vw, 800px);. Now, if you check your browser, you’ll see that your div’s width increases and decreases based on your viewport. There’s one small drawback though. clamp is not supported by Internet Explorer at the time of this writing but with that being said, this concludes today’s article.
Let me know what you guys think in the comments section. Stay safe and happy coding!
