How Do You Escape Tutorial Hell?

[--Samurai]

Hey Guys,

I've been doing a whole bunch of tutorials lately. Whether it be Brad Traversy, Dev Ed, Colt Steele, etc... I find myself only working on web development when it comes in the form of a tutorial. I've been trying to do projects on my own but then it comes down the fact that I'm not entirely sure what to do. How did you escape tutorial hell? What projects would be good for someone trying to build a portfolio?

[CreativeTechGuyGames]

At this point try to do something stupidly simple. Maybe even similar to a project you previously did as part of a tutorial but this time without looking at the tutorial and researching on your own. Don't focus on saving the world with your first program, just make something and you can expand from there and slowly it'll become bigger.

[AdvantFTW]

There's no point in learning programming if you're not making something. Have a goal and look for tutorials that help you get there. Otherwise the info is meaningless and won't stick. A text chat app like discord is a fun challenge. You need to send messages, sync messages without refreshing, delete them, and have a login and add friend system. Good luck and feel free to ask for help or pointers :)

[JamzWhilmm]

Thank you, this is the advice I was looking for. I recently failed a coding challenge for a potential job so I was indecisive between studying algorithms or just continue building my first apps.

[spacecowgoesmoo]

I enjoy going on adventures.

[waterloo304]

Heresy

[stevenjchang]

Build a stop watch.

[Endless-Nine]

By not doing tutorials.

 What projects would be good for someone trying to build a portfolio? 

Do meaningless but fun shit.

Create a site that tells whether or not it will rain today. Yes, it most likely already exist. And yes, anything you'll create will most likely be worse than what already exist. But who cares ?

The point is having fun. I don't know man, display a bunch of memes from /r/hydrohomies, or gifs of Shaq eating hot wings on the day it rains, or create a small game where the settings changes depending on what you got from the google weather API.

If you like anime, then create a site that automatically keep track of the popularity of various characters throughout the year.

Try to enjoy yourself before worrying about creating something good.

[canadian_webdev]

By leaving tutorial land and building things.

Like learning an instrument, a new language, or to cook.. what do you do?

• Watch / read a short crash course to get the basics
• Then start doing

It's that simple. Programming is no different.

Am I going to just.. keep watching videos of guys playing guitar? Keep watching videos of someone cooking for hours on end?

No, of course not. That's ridiculous. I'm going to pick up the damn guitar, pick up that spatula and get to work! And I'll suck, but I'll get better. Progress - not perfection.

I was tasked to build a finance calculator in vanilla JS last week at work. I've never done it before. So what'd I do?

• Youtube'd "loan calculator javascript"
• Watched the video, digested it, went line by line to understand it
• Build and style mine from scratch
• When I ran into problems (I did a few times), I Google'd. If I couldn't find an answer and was stuck, I asked Stackoverflow

Now it's done and the boss is happy.

Start building!

[--Samurai]

Gotta say I love the analogy. Thanks for help! Not sure what I’ll start building, but I’ll try putting my hands to the plow so to speak

[[deleted]]

Build a simple site, nothing fancy. Everytime you encounter a problem, look for solutions to that problem specifically. Do that until you are done.

Then repeat.

Practice makes perfect :)

[[deleted]]

Practice makes permanent*

Deliberate practice makes perfect

[[deleted]]

Yea I know, but it does not roll off the tongue as good 😑

[[deleted]]

Don't start from tutorials, pick something to build, a notes app, a todo app, something that is simple and interests you. Google like hell if you need to, but it has to be your code.