How To Get Out of Tutorial Hell (Step by Step Guide)

The Beginner's JavaScript course in this course alright guys welcome to my beginner's programming tutorial stop get some help tutorial hell is a spiral following coding tutorials videos books or otherwise and not producing any piece of non-tutorial software so you finish your fifth free code Camp 7 hour tutorial then you go to open up vs code and Bam you can't do anything you've been there I've been there we've been there so I've developed this two-part program to get you out before you can go and apply the strategy there are three tiny prerequisites you know the following

programming Concepts variables Loops conditionals functions and optionally the basics of HTML and CSS if you're doing front end that's it two you've picked a narrow stack of software development for example front-end web dev mobile Dev or back-end Dev and finally three you can promise me you're never going to watch another tutorial until this exercise is over so no udemy no wholesome looking dude from free code Camp no beautiful hair web dev simplified no ruggedly handsome Brad from traversee alright so the coveted question how do I get out of tutorial hell we're going to be using

a framework coined by one of my favorite programming bloggers Nick jantakis it's called question driven development and it's a framework that resembles real-life software development you think of an end goal and you break it down into a series of small questions and you Google your way to success I'll be calling it qdd for the rest of this video here you want to do small projects using qdd what do small projects mean less than 100 lines of unique code which means no boiler play so your first question where do I find projects you can use the

following prompts so beginner problems in X language beginner exercises in X language and you'll find a long list of problems like create a temperature your converter write a function that checks if a word is a palindrome convert seconds into hours and if you like math puzzles you can do more of those problems so how do I even use qdd in this approach let's look at the palindrome problem a palindrome is a word that's spelled the same backwards think Bob or kayak and we have to check whether or not a word is a palindrome and print

true if it is your first Google could be as simple as how do I code JS in vs code then you'll Google the next problem how do I reverse a string in JS and at this stage I know you're going to copy and paste it but the catch here is that you're gonna have to figure out how to make stack Overflow code work in your own code inside a function with conditionals and you're just gonna have to keep Googling till you get unstuck and bang you get it wait a minute why should I even do

this and why 50. well first you need to make coding fun and the only way to do that is if you have a positive feedback loop setting up the basics by doing a lot of these small problems gets your brain warming up but not overflowing it with a lot of information now you're going to realize that a lot of these tiny problems eventually add up into full-blown projects once you piece them together now that you've done your minimum of 50 projects and you're all warmed up go find 10 websites that you find are cool and

unique and clone them but wait why clone them well for starters you don't have to think of design style or functionality you basically don't give yourself a chance to procrastinate and also a lot of beginner programmers get caught up in the idea of having to make original projects but you can do that a lot later in your software engineering career you don't have to start off with that now this seems intimidating Until you realize you need to play it before I even start my project I'll write out my MVP minimum viable product which means that

once I have the below features for my project I'll consider it done so let's define our project I want to clone the Reddit landing page so I want the nav bar I want the sidebar and I want the feed and it'll be really cool to have this pop-up login screen once you've laid this all out you'll notice that each of these are just mini projects that you can combine together so look at the nav bar it's just a search bar with fake categories and a Reddit logo a login button and a settings button that don't

have to do anything at this stage you can break these down into even smaller parts like the search bar you can ask yourself a series of questions like how do I create a search bar in HTML and CSS or how do I add an icon next to the search bar and you can break each question down even further until you have the smallest problem that you can go and Google and figure out this is known as decomposition and computer science and it's probably the most vital skill of any developer but more importantly you now have

a list of goals you can go and Achieve which creates a positive feedback loop so you're motivated to keep working now that you're done with tutorial rehab let's face it you're always going to need tutorials so the best approach is to build a healthy relationship with them as a general tip whenever you're doing a tutorial write three tiny projects with the content you've learned at the end of each section so for example after I've watched the forms and input section I will make three crappy forms in View and this is a general rule going forward

learn then build and that's the end of this video thank you so much for your time if you guys have any questions please feel free to leave them down below and if this video gets 20 likes I'll make a step-by-step guide on how to get a tech job