Tutorial hell

I taught myself. For a long stretch, that meant tutorials.

The loop

A chapter would finish. I would open the next one. The finished list grew. I could say what a course had covered. I had nothing I had built from it.

While the video was playing, it felt like learning. The next line was already decided. I typed it, the example ran, and I moved on.

If I paused, I could explain the step I had just watched. That explanation belonged to the video. I closed it, opened an empty file, and did not know where to start.

The next course

I took the empty file as proof I was not ready. The fix was another course. A longer one, or one that started a step earlier, so the gap I had just hit would be gone.

It felt like the careful thing to do. The gap was still there at the end, because the gap was the empty file, and I kept saving that file for later.

The days looked full. Chapters checked off, one after another. The part I was skipping was the one where nobody was typing ahead of me.

Stopping

I stopped the courses.

I picked a problem that did not come with a walkthrough. Something I wanted to exist, small enough to see the whole of it, broken in ways I could not name yet. Website support had already been that kind of work.

A page fails. You do what they did. You find the step where it stops. A tutorial never left me in that step for long. The person recording had already found it, then cut the looking so the typing looked clean.

What I do now

A video on this machine is for news. A release, a tool someone shipped, something that happened. When I need to learn how to do a thing, I do the thing.

It is slower, and it looks messier. The first attempt fails. The error is a sentence I do not understand. I change one piece and run it again.

Sometimes the failure moves. I read the docs for the one function I am stuck on. If another project has already solved that kind of problem, I open that part of it.

A lot of the answers show up late. I leave the chair and the bug comes with me. I am in bed with my eyes open, still walking the same few lines, and then a change occurs to me that I had not tried. I get up and run it. Often that is the one that moves it.

I still want a clear explanation once I know which wall I have hit. I quit living in the chapters, finishing them, and calling that the work.

A tutorial is still worth watching ; )

Watch it and then build the thing, or skip the video and build it anyway. You get better at troubleshooting by being the one who has to fix the break.

A scripted video, or a puzzle that is already solved, never puts you there. The steps are clean and the bug is gone, so the next time something fails you go looking for another tutorial.

Solve enough of your own and the next bug starts to resemble the last one. Keep learning the thing in front of you, and keep troubleshooting the part that fails.