How to dig yourself out of the coding tutorial rut

Photo credit: Pixabay.

We’ve all been there. Learning to code, completing tutorial after tutorial but getting nowhere. Then, self-doubt kicks in. “This is too hard.” “Maybe coding isn’t for me.” I’m sure you know the feeling.

I experienced this very same problem myself recently. I’m a fairly confident junior PHP developer, but I decided that I wanted to learn a little more about Python —especially Django.

I searched online and found what looked like the perfect tutorial. It was complex enough to be challenging but simple enough so as not to overwhelm. It was a project-based tutorial, and I liked the look of the end project. I thought it would be another cool thing to add to my ever growing portfolio.

Eighty percent of the way into this tutorial, I suddenly had a spell of self-doubt. I had watched the videos and manually retyped all the code. I had a neat project that I could show people. So why did I feel like I was no better off than when I had started?

After several weeks of spending my evenings working through a tutorial, I had a nice finished project. Even then, I still didn’t feel like I had the skills to replicate this project myself without guidance. So could I really use it in my portfolio? Was it really that impressive to have a portfolio project that looked and functioned identically to everyone else’s? And which had code that was identical to the code on the instructor’s GitHub profile?

Had I really showcased any of my skills other than my ability to follow step-by-step instructions?

You see, following tutorials is great. You’ll get exposure to new skills. But you don’t learn any of the other skills that are required to be a successful junior developer by following tutorials alone. I’m talking about:

• Planning and organizing a project
• Knowing what tools are best for a given business need
• Researching solutions to your own problems
• Overcoming problems that inevitably crop up during development

Tutorials are a good way to hit the ground running

To put things in context, I’m a 29-year-old former plumber who now works as a junior developer for a software company. I decided on a career change around 12 months ago.

Like most new coders, I started completing the usual courses before moving onto more advanced tutorials. My main focus was learning PHP, as this was the only language that I’d really heard of when I started. Soon, I became familiar with its basic syntax and use.

Nine months later, I had completed enough tutorials and had enough understanding and motivation to convince a local software company to give me an opportunity. (You can read more about how I convinced an employer to take a chance on me and pay me to learn to code here.)

At the end of the day, what helped me stand out as a candidate and get a job after such a short time was my ability to show real-world examples of the projects that I had built. And when I say projects, I mean my own projects, not just things that I had copied/pasted following along with a tutorial.

Tutorials will only get you so far. Then, you need to start building projects