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Copying tutorials for 6 months taught me almost nothing and I think the "just build projects" advice is backwards for total beginners
Everyone in this community says to skip the boring stuff and just build projects, but that advice wrecked me when I started last January. I copied along with about 40 YouTube videos building todo apps and weather dashboards, and I could not write a single for loop from scratch without looking it up. The thing nobody says is that following a tutorial is mostly typing, not thinking, and your brain tricks you into feeling like you learned something. What finally worked was spending two weeks on plain boring basics, variables, loops, functions, arrays, just doing tiny 10 line exercises in the console until I could write them with no video. My friend Dan in Portland did it the other way and quit after a month because he felt lost, and I get why. Projects are great once you have maybe 20 percent of the basics under your belt, but starting with a full app is like learning guitar by trying to play a whole song on day one. So what actually got you unstuck, was it grinding basics first or did jumping into projects really work for you?
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ryan9521mo ago
Gotta disagree with the timeline here, since 6 months of tutorials is way past when you should have bailed and started breaking stuff on your own. Building projects works because you hit a wall, get stuck, and actually have to think your way out, which no tutorial can teach you. Two weeks of loops and arrays is fine, but at some point you just have to build something that breaks and fix it yourself.
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