The Pattern #1 - Escaping Tutorial Hell
So you’ve been trying to learn to program for a while and you’ve followed along several tutorials. 👨💻
You’ve read that you need to create your own project to stand out in the market and set out to create something novel.
You realise you are completely lost and don’t know where to even start. So you reach for more tutorials, better tutorials.
Slowly, it dawns on you that you are constantly following step-by-step instructions and never applying the skills learned in a meaningful way.
You my friend, are in tutorial hell 🔥
Where did things go wrong?
When you encounter difficulties in learning, trying to overcome them by seeking out more tutorials and exploring new topics can often make the situation worse.
Constant exposure to new information without practice will lead to increase in the gap between what you know and what you’ve been exposed to, resulting in anxiety and self-doubt.
The question then is how does one escape it ? 🤔
In short, you need to increase your competency without increasing your exposure.
Here are some pointers on how to do that:
🎮 Play — Iterate with what you’ve already learnt and built. Let’s say you built a To Do List app, great. Now, can you add an extra feature e.g. ability to set a reminder. Playfully adding features that you want and pushing the boundaries of what you know is a great way to practice.
🧐 Reframe — creating something, even if it’s not a complete application, is still an accomplishment. It’s common for students to say “I don’t know how to build anything”. You’ve created a pipeline that runs a basic script? You’ve built something. You made hello world appear on a web page? You’ve built something. By reframing what you consider to be building “anything” you can reduce imposter syndrome and increase confidence.
📚 Revisit — Go back and revisit topics you’ve already studied, especially the foundational ones. Sometimes abstract concepts take a while to sink in and revisiting a topic can highlight that. Watch more tutorials, if necessary, but stay on the same topic until you get a good understanding. It can be easy to get distracted by shiny new technologies, but it’s important to master the basics before moving on to more advanced topics.
These tips might not get you all the way out of the maze, but I hope it gets you closer to the gate 🙂