Development Path

Recently, I learned that being stuck in "tutorial hell", was the worst thing to hurt your career chances in Software Development. Let me explain.

What is Tutorial Hell?

Tutorial Hell is a statement that most Software Developers have found themselves in at the beginning stages of learning how to code. What is tutorial hell? This statement 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. But, this can lead to months on months of just watching tutorials and never being able to make your own projects, without help from those tutorials. The only reason why I know this so well was because I was stuck in tutorial hell for 6-8 months without any end in sight. Do you feel this way? Want to learn how to get out?

How to Get Out of Tutorial Hell

Learning how to read Documentation is KEY! Reading Documentation means, instead of going back to YouTube or googling a video to learn how to do something when you get stuck, you sit down read the documentation for what is troubling you and finding a solution. Your probably asking yourself the same question I was asking myself when I learned about this trick, "Why does it matter if I read documentation or watch a video"?

The real reason why we don't want to be stuck on video tutorials our whole career is due to the fact that learning how to google is a special skill to have when becoming a Software Developer. Your boss or coworkers will be wondering why your pulling up a video to figure out a bug or problem in your code, instead of finding the documentation. Now another big reason to start learning how to read documentation is due to the fact that most videos only cover the basics of certain languages, but documentation reaches down deep into the heart of the language or problem your struggling with in your code.

Your probably asking now, "What is good sources to rely on for documentation"?

Reliable Documentation Sources

The top 5 reliable documentation sources are:

1. W3Schools
2. FreeCodeCamp
3. Medium Articles
4. GeeksforGeeks
5. Stack Overflow

Once you become a "great googler", when you look up troubleshooting questions, I would look for these websites first, because they have been the most reliable sources for my coding experience. W3Schools, will always be my top source to go to due to the fact that every question I have, usually pops up with a link to W3Schools and they nail my question with a great answer in 3 minutes of research.

If you want to look up deep solutions to problems that might be harder to find, Stack Overflow can be helpful. Stack Overflow is a forum created by developers to answer questions to any problems you might have, but take caution because this website can be toxic if you ask a generic or easier question to some of the developers on the forum.

Medium Articles are a great find for generic to specific solutions to problems, just depends mainly on the author of the page. Free Code Camp and GeeksforGeeks are great resources to help you in with special syntax errors or learning how to code in general.

To summarize, tutorial hell can be a hard stage to get out of early into your career path, but the quicker to step away from videos and tutorials and focus on documentation sources, the better.

Development Path: Challenge

The coding challenge I want you to conquer today is, create a small project using HTML, if you're already using CSS, provide CSS basics inside of this project.

Don't use a tutorial video, use the sources I provided you today and google anything you might have trouble with. I know this might be hard at first, but the knowledge you will gain from this single small project will change your life. I promise.

Don't expand on the project to much, make it a project you can start and finish in a couple of hours or 1 day.

Development Path

Show me the code!

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