Learning How to Learn - As a Developer

You might have heard of something called tutorial hell. Tutorial hell is where people find themselves when trying to learn how to code. They follow along tutorials again and again, but can never get their own idea of what they should build. This article will offer you a solution, an escape, from tutorial hell.

you’ll probably want to do things that aren’t covered in the course(s) you’re following. It’s going to be up to you to figure out how to do so.

Tutorial Courses

Tutorial courses are a great way to learn a new programming environment. They tend to introduce you to the language(s) to be used, and then they walk you through the process of building something. It’s extremely useful to see how things are done differently in a new environment, rather than the one you’re used to.

However, new developers tend to use these tutorial courses wrongly. Rather than gathering some concepts and applying them to their projects, they quickly move onto another tutorial course, perhaps even a tutorial course completely unrelated to the material they just learned. They figure they have a portfolio piece that will impress some recruiter. Well, that might be the case. It’s also highly likely these recruiters are seeing the same portfolio piece, again and again, and know exactly where it came from. This could be detrimental.

We discussed why people might get stuck in tutorial hell. Let’s explore the escape path.

Escaping tutorial hell

You’ve followed a tutorial. Let’s say it’s a MERN (MongoDB, Express, React, Node) stack application. Typically, the course would make one of these technologies the primary focus, but it would also cover quite a few topics, such as:

• Authentication/Authorization
• CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations
• Data Modelling

Okay, great. What’s the idea here? The idea is to transfer this knowledge to another project! We know. This might be the challenging part for you – what project should you build? Well, let’s give you an example based on an actual course.

The Node.js, Express, MongoDB & More: The Complete Bootcamp builds a complete project called Natours. Take a look at it, and ask yourself what you could potentially make with this to start a business in your city. We’re sure there are lots of similar tours in your area. Wine tasting, skiing, and more.

If your city is, let’s say, Boston, then you might go register a domain name, bestbostontours.com, and begin editing the Natours project to fit your specific needs. Also note that the Natours project will not be a 100% production-ready application, which is indeed a good thing. The course equipped you with the proper knowledge to make it production-ready, so it’s up to you to complete it.

It doesn’t just end here. This same idea could be applied to any tutorial course. You might follow along a simple HTML and CSS project-based course. After you complete it, you might add some of the things you’ve learned into another project, for example.

And thus the learning process begins – this is where you truly escape tutorial hell – you’ll probably want to do things that aren’t covered in the course(s) you’re following. It’s going to be up to you to figure out how to do so.