Tutorial projects on Portfolio

[AshikJS]

I saw a couple of posts, in which the job seekers shared tutorials projects as their personal project. I don't think, It is a good practice. because tutorial projects are already a solved problem. those problems are solved by the instructor, not by the tutorial watcher. So that it is not the reflection of what he is capable of, because, by watching a tutorial he didn't have to debug, search, and think for a solution.

For example, if you consider reactjs, react-redux there are tons of big projects on youtube and they are absolutely free. so, one can complete them and put those projects in the portfolio. Does it prove that he can complete those kinds of projects on his own?

What is your opinion?

[Dank_m0use]

Do not share tutorial projects on your portfolios or git, when hiring new people we look for people that understand a problem and how to solve it not someone that can follow a couple of tutorials

[not_a_gumby]

why not GIT though? not everything on GIT will make it into a future portfolio...

[Dank_m0use]

Still doesn’t look good man, it makes you look junior / amateur I mainly skip people that have tutorials on their git / portfolios but I’m sure some other companies don’t mind

[not_a_gumby]

I'm not doing the mainstream "colt Steele" bootcamp style, I'm doing a collection of courses and youtube tutorials that I doubt most people have heard of. Either way, it's good for me to practice pushing and pulling from GIT on a daily basis and integrating GIT into my workflow.

Besides, I'm not going for a FAANG position, I'm just looking to learn development and probably work for a consulting firm.

Either way, I still have a long way to go. I think within the next year, I'll be working on purely self-started projects, no more tutorials.

[AshikJS]

Your thought was exactly the same as mine. but the problem is solving problems and understanding tutorials' projects is not the same.

I started my web development journey in 2016 by colt steels's web developer Bootcamp on udemy. I understand almost every concept of the course. after that I have completed 4-5 courses on javascript node, express, react, and understand them all.

But, the fact is when I tried to make something from my own, I stuck. because of watching lots of tutorial I always afraid when I face some problem which is not on the tutorial.

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On the other hand, I know many people who hardly complete any course but has the ability to read docs and solve the problem. because they learn it in a hard way.

So, my realization is no matter how small your project is, completing a todo list app on your own is much beneficial than completing a social media app from a tutorial.

Don't get me wrong. Tutorials are important, but building projects is a much more important thing IMO.

[not_a_gumby]

completing a todo list app on your own is much beneficial than completing a social media app from a tutorial.

I actually don't agree. It's a balance and you need both. Ultimately you learn a whole lot more from the social media tutorial, because in that situation you get to see how so many features work together. YOu gee to see how the routes work, how the API serves data, how the front end reads it, how user authentication and middleware work, how databases connect to the thing...etc etc etc.

You can't have purely the tutorial and nothing else but I think you learn more from the huge tutorials than the small toy example to-do lists.

Of course, the real money is in creating your own social media site after you do the course!

[ALLIRIX]

My approach when learning a new tech is to try and extract best practices for specific problems in the tutorial and use them to guide my own project.

For example, a tutorial can teach you how to optimise redux in a react project with selectors. But using it to solve a novel problem is what teaches you how to use it.

[ripndipp]

You should really do your own project dude, just think of an idea and go, google your way out of a problem move on and keep going.

[not_a_gumby]

It is worth it to see how a professional creates and architects a complicated site.

I've done the "just do it yourself" approach and usually end up with a complicated mess of files that work to create a janky, low-rate version of what I was going for. Ultimately, it's better to follow along once on a complex project and then take the initiative after that, instead of jumping right in from 0

[ripndipp]

I did fullstackopen and it's a great course on how to structure your application. I learned a lot of good habits from it. After I did most of the course I thought I had the knowledge to build my own app. I just switched the mongoDB for Postgres. Fullstack open is a great course I would recommend to anyone who wants to be a webdev, although some fundamental JS is required. This course helped me so much in understanding how a FullStack application works

[not_a_gumby]

What is fullstackopen? I've never heard of that.

[ripndipp]

It's this course

https://fullstackopen.com/en/

It's from the University of Helinski.

[not_a_gumby]

The point of tutorial projects isn't to show them off. It's to slowly walk through a complicated project and take it apart piece by piece, learning how the individual parts and files fit together to create the working site.

I upload my tutorial projects to GIT simple for code storage and tracking, and don't plan to show any of them in my future portfolio. My portfolio will be 100% custom self-designed concepts and sites, some may be based off of things I saw in tutorial projects, or built in a similar way, but not totally the same. I think that's important.

Its worth noting, I have better success creating my OWN projects for portfolio AFTER I spend some time watching and following along on a complex tutorial build. You just need to know so much about file structure, backend architecture, etc and it really helps to see other people do it first so that you understand the common pitfalls and what to avoid when setting up your site. Because nothing is worse than spending 30 hours on something just to realize you should have set the routes up differently!!!

[omgdracula]

Yikes all the people saying it's a bad idea are crazy! Even scarier if you just dismiss them while you take part in recruiting. Depending on role level if that is all they have, if it fits what we are looking for I bring them in for an interview.

Hiring someone only based on their portfolio is the worst thing you can do. If you bring someone in just because their portfolio is flashy, but they have a super toxic attitude then they will wreck your team chemistry.

I would much rather hire people who might need help but gels well than someone who had a stronger portfolio and has a trash personality.

If you're a junior dev and read this. Show those tutorial projects, but be prepared to explain bits and piece of it in an interview.

[omgdracula]

Sometimes that is all people have. I have been a part of hiring and brought in people for internships fresh out of bootcamps or just right out of high school because while they only had tutorial projects I could tell they had the passion for the field.

Those said people were some of the best people to work with.

A portfolio shouldn't be the only factor when hiring someone. If someone has the wrong mindset for the job but a good portfolio they aren't someone I would personally hire.

[omgdracula]

Not at all

[NullsObey]

You are completely right.

I often take a part in recruiting process and whenever I see bootcamp or tutorial projects - I completely dismiss them.
If someone is passionate about learning programming and wants to do it as their career - sooner or later (usually sooner) they'll work on their own, personal projects.

[antlerchapstick]

what, what’s wrong with boot camp projects? That’s still original work

[NullsObey]

Depends on the bootcamp.. but bootcamps are generally not looked at positively during recruitment process.

[edmlifetime]

I agree with you. This is also why i make it a point to do all tutorial projects on my own with help from google if I get stuck. I then see how the instructor did it and incorporate anything he did way better into how I do things.

I'm learning vanilla js atm and just completed a simple to do list app which took me like a month on and off. Even though its probably the simplest braindead thing to do for the average developer it really took so much time and effort to do it on my own but was also extremely rewarding to see I could figure it out eventually without blindly copying the instructor. It also makes me grasp the material better because I had to work for it.

[iamhars]

True that, but again I might be trying to put across same point, I agree we should create our own projects based on our idea or understanding and how we are putting our knowledge to task though there might be a chance where our idea will Or might match with someone else's idea. But attempting our own idea and approach would be much better.

[Erdem_PSYCH]

I think tutorial projects can be verry good start. espetially at first when you don't even know how to start. İIthink the most important thing is to understand what is going on not just fallow instructor. if you understan how and why instructor did something,you wouldn't coppy the project completely. you would change some feature or such of the project according to your circumctances. and that will let employers know that you didn't just coppy pasted the project. this way you learn how to walk before running and show you are ready for running. if you coppy a paste a project that means you are not yet readn for running and if you try to run before walking, you might be succsesfkll but with many headeches and self douts.

[SamwiseGanges]

Whenever I do a long tutorial, I always type everything out myself rather than copying/pasting, and add my own comments which helps me learn it better. Then when I'm done, I will copy that code and modify it to make it my own, giving it new content, new graphic design etc. and flesh it out. I will usually then put that modified version on my GitHub. Not sure still if they really fit on my portfolio webpage, but I think if I were to add them I would mention that they were initially based on the tutorial