I Stopped Watching Coding Tutorials

Here’s why you should too.

Photo by Jefferson Santos on Unsplash

At the beginning of my software engineering journey, I devoured coding tutorials left and right. After a while, I realized I was not retaining the information these videos presented to me. I’d watch them and not remember anything. So I stopped.

In this post, I’d like to share what I did instead if you’re in the same situation.

I Needed To See It First-Hand

Watching coding tutorials is like watching a bicycle course on YouTube without ever getting on one and trying to cycle. You might get an idea, but you’ll never have the same deep understanding builders do.

I knew that, for my understanding, I needed to build something with my own two hands.

I Opted For Projects Instead

Instead of watching tutorials, I searched for projects. And you’ll be surprised how many creators opt for creating a generalized course instead of a transformational one.

Instead of a “Python Developer” course, I needed a “Hands-on FastAPI course.”

I wanted to build something from scratch and understand all the parts associated with it.

Just-In-Time Learning

The concept of JIT is known in the software engineering world. When modules aren’t needed all the time, we load them to the memory only when we need them.

Your learning could also utilize the same philosophy. I used JIT learning in many of my work-related tasks. For example, When building a new microservice on Kubernetes. Maybe you don’t know how to make Kubernetes probe your service for health checks. That’s a JIT learning opportunity.

Conclusion

This short article explains why I stopped watching coding tutorials and what I did instead. I have also introduced the concept of Just-In-Time Learning which is a way for developers to keep going and not get stuck when they don’t understand something.

I hope this article was helpful to you! If it was, please consider sharing it with your developer friends. Let me know in the comments below what your learning process is for software engineering!

Originally published at https://orencodes.substack.com on October 14, 2022.