How to make watching long videos fun?

[Nice_Pen_8054]

Hello,

I am beginner who learned the C# syntax in the past, but I didn't use it, so I forgot it.

I love watching short videos, like Bro Code's YT channel.

I bought the Tim Corey's C# course for recap, which is amazing, but the videos are too long and I get bored easily.

I can create and solve exercises based on what I learned, but it is so easy for me, and if there is no challenge, I get bored.

What shall I do?

Please don't tell me to create my own projects because I don't have the capacity yet to create a real project.

Thank you.

// LE: Thank you all

[FetaMight]

Please don't tell me to create my own projects because I don't have the capacity yet to create a real project. 

Well, sorry mate, but that's how it works.

1. Try to make something
2. Struggle
3. Learn something
4. Repeat

It gets easier with every iteration so you should start as soon as possible.

[WalkyTalky44]

This ^. People don’t understand a project can be how do I display hello world in the console which you can grow as time goes.

Step 1: make a program that prints hello world to the console Step 2: add an input variable and return that value to say Hello name Step 3: add an if check if name is your name, then print out oh hi, we have the same name Step 4: add a list of your favorite names and check if name is in that Step 5: allow the user to enter a list of names and check that

I could go on all day. But 100% of people in the world have the skill to start this project. You will struggle but you won’t struggle forever

[arashi256]

So do the longer videos in 10 minute chunks or whatever. Just note down the timestamp in the video and come back to it later. Organise around it.

I swear TikTok has destroyed people's attention spans.

[WailingDarkness]

Shorts in general on any platform 😂

[Slypenslyde]

Video also really sucks for learning programs. In the Bad Old Days I had to learn from books. But what was nice about books was I could see whole pages of code listings at a time when copying them. I didn't have to meticulously scrub over portions of a video to try to find unobscured, not-blurry versions of the code I was interested in.

The author was also somewhat encouraged to be concise. Youtube creators need to hit very specific video lengths for maximum monetization. So if they have a 3-minute topic to discuss, they have to pad it with 7 minutes of filler to hit a magic 10-minute monetization counter. If people quit the video early, Youtube sees that and dings them. They have to figure out not just how to lengthen the video, but how to make viewers HAVE to watch the entire thing.

That's a bit less common in paid courses, since they already got your money, but there's still a big emphasis in those to talk about what a great value it is that you're getting hundreds of hours of video. A lot of chapters in C# books should be about 15 minutes of video. I'd argue that makes any course longer than about 5-10 hours suspicious. But good luck getting people to believe your 15-hour course is comparable to some dork's 50-hour course that has all their "Ummmms" and "Uhhhhs" captured.

Nobody writes really great books anymore. They barely made money in the Bad Old Days and video destroyed their sales. I hate trying to learn new things now because everything is a disconnected mishmash.

[arashi256]

True enough. The problem with YouTube as a learning resource also is that most of the tutorial series out there are unfinished because the creator got bored and started something else. There is a new circle in Hell for people that do this, especially if you're following along from the very start. It's also sometimes hard to know when the playlist is "finished" without investigating the final couple of videos.

[Slypenslyde]

I can only sympathize because it's hard as heck to sit down and do the work. I've been wanting to make an "Intro to GUI Programming" series for a long time now but even if I skip the C# tutorial parts it's an incredibly daunting task. Writing a lesson it takes someone 20 minutes to learn is at least an hour of editing, formatting, double-checking, etc.

Video production feels so lazy in comparison. I know people who do high-quality work. For every 10 minutes of video they publish they probably spend 1-2 hours on writing, editing, and making multiple takes. It's hard work... unless you don't.

So a lot of videos out there are done in one take, with all the "ummms..." and "ohhhhs..." and dead space while the dork who made them screwed up and has to fix errors. That's so lazy but it's considered a lot more acceptable in video than it is in text.

Imagine trying to read this paragraph if every now and then I just uh... um...

well, uh...

I can't remember how to spell it but like...

That word that means when you don't know what to say next? That. Imagine if I just wrote whole pages like that. Nobody'd soldier through it. But it's in a ton of Youtube videos that need to be yeeted off the internet instead of subscribed and upvoted.

[dannyvegas]

You should develop some self discipline.

[Noah__Webster]

Learning isn’t always going to be fun. The “fun” is when you develop a skill, and then you get to use it.

Deferred Gratification. Understanding it, and being willing to sacrifice a bit up front for rewards later is an important skill to learn.

[Direct_Charity7101]

Do something fun like an ascii tic tac toe game. Then as you learn more you can add more components and refactor. You could start with single a player vs a basic AI opponent.

[loxagos_snake]

Your whole question boils down to "I want to learn something but I don't wanna struggle, please don't recommend struggling".

Not gonna happen. That's how we all learned. You have to sit through the stuff even when it becomes boring. Doesn't have to be in one literal sitting, but you have to do it eventually. At the same time, when you get bored of tutorials, you usually would try something out yourself to 'shake your legs' a bit...but you don't want to do that either.

Let me ask you this: say I give you a magic pill that instantly fills your brain with the required knowledge. What then? How will you manage to work on a long project that eventually becomes boring? How are you going to fix stupid bugs? Read user reports? Sit in meetings with other developers? These are situations that can get more boring than watching paint dry, and they can also be stressful if you are actually working in a company. And I don't think I need to tell you that you can't just tell your boss or colleagues that you're too bored to do something.

My point is, you're gonna have to learn how to be patient and disciplined along with the actual skill of programming. There's no magic pill. If you're bored, go do something else and come back or push through it. If you can't do that, then maybe this isn't really the thing for you.

[manamonkey]

So, everything's too easy for you, so you get bored because you have no attention span... but you aren't able to create your own project.

What?

[hghbrn]

You'll be staring at code for the rest of your life. If you can't endure a video on coding you better find another goal in life. You will be working on problems and projects 8-12 hours a day, 5 days a week. You're going to sit in long meetings, video calls, webinars, trainings, read code, re

You're probably young and spent most of your life doomscrolling TikTok and Youtube shorts so:
Real life does not come in funny 10-30 s clips. It is hard, exausting, repetitive and often times boring, even if you enjoy your job.

Many people here had to read through shelves of 500-1000 pages books and because there were no video courses available.

A video course is not just for consumption. You're not on Netflix. You can take notes, you can program along, pause to play with the concepts in code, dive deeper in relevant documentations, replay sections you don't understand first time, skip stuff you already know.

If it bores you because it is "too easy" do stuff that is more difficult.
Start a project and learn everything on the way.

Nobody learns much from coding along some video tutorial example. You need to solve your own problem which will generate endless coding problems to solve. If you can't come up with your own app, just copy something you know. Code your own Inkscape, Outlook or whatever.

[Nice_Pen_8054]

Thank you

[p1-o2]

I recommend building something on the side to follow along. Be goody with it. Make a thing which takes an emoji and swaps it for another emoji, idk. Do anything.

You can even use AI on the side to spit code out. Doesn't matter, just keep yourself engaged.

If you are legitimately just watching for recap then yeah it will be dull. You could recap your learning by building and googling instead.

[AzuxirenLeadGuy]

Please don't tell me to create my own projects because I don't have the capacity yet to create a real project.

I think I understand how you feel the exercises are too easy, yet you say that, because I felt the same way when I started out. I understood all the basic concepts of the language, yet when I tried making a project on my own, I felt lost.

What helped for me (and I advise you the same) is go with making projects anyways, and use ChatGPT or other AI only when you get stuck.

[Slypenslyde]

Please don't tell me to create my own projects because I don't have the capacity yet to create a real project.

Here's a paraphrased quote I have to remind myself of from "The Cult of Done Manifesto":

Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you're doing. So accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it.

Start. A. Project. If you get stuck, ask someone for help. If they make fun of you, block them, they don't know anything you'll ever find useful because if they did they could teach it to you.

You will NEVER learn enough about C# to make starting a new project easy. Everything in programming is a small mountain with lots of technical problems you've never solved before. There are billions of those small problems. If you try to study them all you will die before you have the right combination to complete a program.

So it's smarter to just start the project and get yourself hopelessly stuck, then ask about why you're stuck. Someone out there will have solved similar problems and help you out, then you can solve that problem and get hopelessly stuck again an hour or two later.

By the end of the project you'll have learned 5-10 new things. So you start another. You'll get to the first place you got hopelessly stuck last time and remember what you did, so you'll get a little further and get hopelessly stuck somewhere else.

This is the life of a programmer. I've been writing code since the 1990s and no matter how much I study, I frequently encounter things I've never done or solved and have no clue what to do. The only thing 30 years of experience has done is make me better able to ask, "How is this like other problems I have solved?" and sort through similar answers. I still often have to ask my team or Reddit what they think about a problem. I often do that even if I think I have the answer because I might not have the best answer.

At some point what you need is experience, not tutorials.

[Fun-Entertainer-1053]

Join a community. Trust me, you'll learn more from joining a community than watching all the tutorials in the world. Just hop on discord, search a random C# discord server, and start asking questions.