Tutorial hell is referred to as a time in your new developer journey where you are watching tutorials, able to follow along, and replicate what the instructor is doing and it works. There is nothing wrong with that, the real problem begins when you try what you’ve learned without the tutorial and you don’t know 1% of how to do it.
The reason is that the instructor planned their lesson, tested it ahead of time, knew which libraries to use, knew which functions need to be made, knew which abstractions would be used, and tried it before they built it again and recorded it.
The catch here is that the instructor went through the debugging and troubleshooting part that you are stuck in right now the first time and they figured it out, but they only show you the working version (or what I love to call the utopian version).
What you don’t realize when you follow only tutorials
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- Lack of Risk: Building a project from a tutorial has no risk. You can’t fail. If you ever get stuck you can continue watching the video for the answer, or even check the GitHub repository for the complete code! You don’t feel a real risk because you already have all the answers.
- Impostor Syndrome: The fear of being exposed as a fake programmer or developer is a very real condition most self-taught and even junior developers have. Following a tutorial is an excellent way to gain knowledge and calm this fear. But true knowledge comes from actual struggle and searching for the right solution.
Understand
No alt text provided for this image You have to realize what you don’t know. You watch the tutorial and it works, but if you think deeper you’ll realize you don’t know the libraries being used or you aren’t familiar with a specific function or hook that was used. Don’t be braindead, you need to understand at least 50% of what is going on there.
Read documentation
No alt text provided for this image There’s no escape from reading the documentation. The problem you are having is not unique to you, almost every developer goes through this at some point in their young developer career (I’m having the same problem and writing an article about it 😁).
After reading the documentation for quite some time now, it’s not that bad. I didn’t expect that documentations are friendly these days.
Conclusion
I’m not saying that you should stop following tutorials, they are now one of the main resources to learn from, but you should understand that watching is not enough, you need to play in the dirt with both of your hands and understand what is going on.
With all that, I wish you luck to become a Rock Star.
Sources:
https://adrian-td96.medium.com/what-is-tutorial-hell-d24c1bdb279f https://hackernoon.com/9-step-solution-to-escape-tutorial-hell-permanently
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