Short and opinionated

Stop Watching Programming Tutorials

Do your own thinking instead.

Image by Nicklas Millard.

I get it. You’re working on a task or trying to learn something new. You just need to watch one more tutorial to get some inspiration.

Just one more, and you’re all good and ready to try it out yourself.

But, let’s be honest, you’re stuck in tutorial-limbo, or tutorial hell as some call it.

No amount of tutorials will ever substitute the need for trial-and-error and testing things for yourself. You absolutely need to build things and try different approaches.

Even trying to build the same thing repeatedly using varying techniques and approaches is a great learning experience.

Tutorials make your mind numb. You learn to follow a recipe but accomplishing the simplest of things on your own is almost incomprehensible.

I think the main issue with tutorials is that they’re “too perfect.” You’ll rarely — if ever — build anything that you find in a tutorial. Instead, when you’re in the process of learning something new, read documentation, answers on StackOverflow (but don’t copy and paste), or opinion pieces by other great developers.

Despite tutorials risking being “too perfect”, I often find them dumbing down code too much, such as resorting to if-else instead of using polymorphic execution, simply because doing that would require too much explaining, that’d otherwise be out-of-scope.

There’s possibly one time where tutorials are great. But, it’s not about the learning outcome prescribed by the tutorial author. It’s about exposure to another developer’s code and thought patterns.