What is tutorial hell?

Constantly moving from one tutorial to another. Never building your own software with your ideas.

Yup, it’s a thing, in fact it’s a very common thing! I myself did fall into this pitfall early on in my learning days.

Tutorials are great for learning the basics, if you search for any software development on youtube you will be presented with an enourmous amount of ‘Beginners guide’ or ‘Zero to Hero’ where you will learn to build simple blog sites, calculators and even games! while these can be great fun to learn with, the chances are that you will forget the majority of what you did.

My story

I remember when I first built a simple blog site - HTML, CSS and Javascript through a video, I was soo excited and I thought.. Yes now I can build websites! So I started my next project, created a directory, added an index.html and then… well I immediately thought, what on earth is next? I can’t remember 😕 how can I not remember? I did it 1 hour ago!

Then.. I went back to the tutorial, watched it again, each time I remembered more but it took a long time. This is the beginning of tutorial hell.

What did I do?

Well after some time I realised I was not getting anywhere, frustrated and annoyed that I was only able to follow tutorials. I was sitting at work one day (I was on ICT service desk at this time) and I found something I wanted to make easier. Every day I had to walk around the building checking all the printers to make sure their ink wasnt low and it had paper.. I found out we could check through web urls because they were connected to the network, checking each one was slow and tedios though, so I had a light bulb moment and thought.. I know javascript, I can webscrape all the urls and get the data and display it in 1 place!

It took me about a week to work it out by googling every question I had because I was adamanet on not trying to find a tutorial this time! and it worked, it was buggy but it worked! and my team liked it too which made me feel awesome! as a bonus, I saved about 40 minutes of my time every day.

From that moment on, I set out to find things to automate by finding my own and asking others.

What you can do!

• A trick to avoid tutorial hell is to avoid going back mulitple times to the tutorials and start researching.

  • Example: you can’t remember how to import javascript into an HTML file. Instead of going through a tutorial; google (or your favourite search engine) it and see what you find. This gives a huge advantage

  • You are learning how to research! arguably the single most important skill to have as a software developer.

  • Worth noting: Don’t just copy and paste what you find. Try to understand it before using it.

• Ask others if they have anything thats repetitive/tedious that could be solved with software. Make sure to start small though, anything big will be too difficult to begin with and overwhelm you.

  • Example: A friend would like pictures in their downloads folder to automatically be moved to the Pictures folder