Are you stuck in the coding learning loop? This used to be the case, but I realized that tutorials were actually holding me back when it came to my programming. Here's how I realized that programming classes were setting me up for failure, and how I fixed it.
Programming tutorials often teach you simple and formulaic techniques.
Tutorials are a good starting point, but that's where they end.
I can't tell you how many lessons I've taught over the years. From coding to CAD to woodworking to 3D printing, there are tutorials for just about everything. The problem with tutorials is that they only teach you very specific tasks. If you're trying to learn how to program a button, you can find dozens of tutorials on the subject. Most button programming tutorials only cover the basics of working with a button and nothing more.
I usually only take the most basic programming lessons and then try to move on to other types of projects as quickly as possible. Basic web development lessons will easily teach me that every HTML file should have at the top of the page, for instance. However, basic HTML tutorials won’t teach you how to build a complex web page.
Doing just tutorials won't teach you as much as doing real projects.
I have always learned more by doing real projects.
When I first started learning programming I was looking for all the tutorials I could find. I did all the basic ones, but they ran out pretty quickly. Then I had to think about what to do next. I'd come up with an idea for a project, but I couldn't find a tutorial on it – and then I'd get stuck in this loop.
In the end, I realized that manual tutorials only helped me and I really needed to learn the basics and not just learn someone else's code. When using tutorials, you can sometimes fall into the copy-and-paste trap. Taking someone else's code and copying it into your own IDEand then we launch it.
Whenever you simply copy and paste code without breaking it down to understand it, you will most likely miss the basic concepts that this tutorial was trying to cover. It took me a while to move from “learning only” mode to “doing real projects” mode, but it was the best thing that happened to me for development. My programming instantly got better and I was able to do a wider range of projects because I was no longer limited to what I could find a copy and paste tutorial for.
You will rarely fail at a lesson, and that's the problem.
Every time, success is for losers… and for users of training programs.
As soon as I stopped copying and pasting other people's code, something interesting happened – my builds began to fail more often. When using someone else's code, it will almost always work fine, unless the dependencies have changed significantly since the tutorial was written. This is because tutorial authors want you to have a good experience with their tutorials, so they make sure the code works.
Because tutorials rarely fail, they rarely teach more than just code written on a screen. Your code works, but do you know Why it works? Why does the button react the way it does when you click on it? How does it know which web page to open? Do some links open in a new window while others open in the current window? Why?
These are questions that can often be left unanswered, even if they are explained in the manual, because you are just copying and pasting the code. Failure is a necessary part of learning, and many teaching aids blur the lines of failure.
Failure is the best teacher you will have.
Failure is half the fun.
Once I started moving away from cookie-cutter tutorials and getting more involved in writing my own code, things started to go wrong. much more often. This meant that I needed to find out what the problem was.
Now with modern AI toolsInvestigating code problems is much easier than before. But if you just don't force the AI to write for you and blindly copy and paste its output, you can still use it for training.
If your code fails, try analyzing it. See what the error log says and then try to figure out Why it failed. Was there a missing comma (my nemesis), perhaps a misspelled function? I can't tell you how many times I've typed something like buttonPress just print buttonpress or Buttonpress or even buttonPRess because my finger was holding the Shift key too long. These types of typos will always cause your code to crash, and if you're just using tutorials, you'll never experiment with them.
I remember many years ago, when I was writing an application for the webOS platform, I forgot a comma in a file containing thousands of lines of code. It was a nightmare to figure out why the error occurred, and at the time I had such terrible internet that I did most of my programming offline, which meant I had no online validators to use.
Once I started allowing myself to fail at coding, I learned a lot more and was eventually able to write better code. Failure truly is the best teacher.
I recently mastered programming Arduino and microcontrollers.. I did maybe two or three tutorials and then I started just saying, “I want this to do X, Y, and Z…how do I do that?” and just tried different things, failed and figured it out until it worked. It taught me so much more than watching over 50 video tutorial series.
Don't get me wrong, programming tutorials are a great place to start learning programming. I've completed my fair share of tutorials, but this is just the beginning of my journey. Now I move on to real projects as soon as I can.
