How to escape tutorial hell - my advice!
I get a lot of emails from people seeking for guidance or advice, I don't know why do they think that I know stuff (honestly, I don't think I know that much), but they ask for advice and I give them some.
I got an email yesterday from a student who's stuck in the "tutorial hell" and is someone who's lost his way and doesn't know what to do - this is his email and also, my answer to him, I hope it helps you as much as it helped him:
His email:
Dear Sir,
Hello, I am a student at K***an University. I’ve heard a lot about you and your excellent skills in coding, and I truly admire your work. I’m reaching out in hopes of getting some guidance from you.
I have a good understanding of the MERN stack with TypeScript, and I’m currently learning PostgreSQL. I also have experience with frontend frameworks like Tailwind CSS and Material UI. I understand the concepts quite well, but unfortunately, I find myself stuck in “tutorial hell.” Despite knowing so much, I struggle to build complete projects on my own, and that’s very frustrating.
Another challenge I face is time and energy. After university, I work 6 to 7 hours, and by the end of the day, I’m too tired to focus on learning or building projects. It’s becoming really hard to stay consistent, and I feel stuck.
I would truly appreciate any advice you can offer—whether it’s on how to break out of tutorial hell, improve project-building skills, or manage stress and time better. Your guidance would mean a lot to me.
Thank you for your time. I look forward to your response.
Best regards,
My answer:
Dear Idress,
Thanks for reaching out and thanks for the kind words.
I don’t know you what semester you are in and I also don’t know about the projects you’ve been working on, but I think you should stick with the tutorial hell thing - hear me out:
Instead of watching tutorials and learning without applying anything, I would suggest you should watch project-based tutorials and obviously code along with them. That way you will learn where to start from and what to work on and how to structure the entire project and also how to use some important tools like Git. I have watched hundreds of hours of tutorials (without coding along with them) and I didn’t know tutorial hell was a thing, back in the day. But when I got to know what I was doing wrong, I couldn’t just change my habits of watching tutorials - so, I just changed the videos I would watch. Instead of watching a tutorial about a specific programming concept, I started watching and coding along with an entire 12 hour YouTube video. And trust me, I learned more in that video than all the hundreds (or maybe thousands) of videos I've watched combined. We humans learn things by doing and that’s why I highly suggest that.
Just to make something clear though, even I, in my stage, feel overwhelmed sometimes. I lose track of where to start from and how to structure the project and what to do if the client wanted a feature and what if I couldn’t deliver the project on time and so on… I think it’s natural, and the stress will get lower and lower the more we gain experience. So don’t worry about that.
Regarding your part-time work, I don’t know if you are working in a programming related job or a job which isn’t related to programming at all, but I can tell you about my own experience. I used to work at Ariana Television (ATN) and with all the stress from work and from university and the project I had from a client at the time, I think I learned the most at that time. Because I was organized and I didn’t have a choice than sticking with my schedule, that made me super productive. Some days, though, I would feel like sh*t, not gonna lie. And that’s okay, we’re all humans and we’re young and we haven’t had any prior working experience and we haven’t worked under stress before, so that’s normal to feel bad and tired, some days.
I think what you lack is a proper time table, do these:
Make a GitHub account (if you don’t have one already) and download the app Todoist and open your calendar app and design your “normal week”. I will attach a screenshot of my calendar for your reference. Then, stick to that plan. Missing a day or two per week is fine, but try not to miss more than two days of work per week. I would highly recommend committing on GitHub every day, because man… the green dots on GitHub gives you a motivation like nothing else. See my GitHub, I haven’t missed a day of coding since January 1st, 2025. I know I am a little lucky because my job is working on clients projects so I kinda have to commit and code every day, but I think it is really a good idea to start committing to github and try your best not to miss any days.
Even if you felt tired, I would suggest you should work for at least 25 minutes per day on your goal (for starters until you get used to it). You can use haroonazizi.com/focus for your focusing session or download a Pomodoro app from App Store/Play Store.
As I said, I don’t know your exact semester and your exact condition, but if you are just starting out, don’t beat yourself up. There’s a very long way to go. Just start doing things that you are interested in. Talk with the friends that you know can be helpful, and are interested to learn alongside you, work on the projects that keep you interested, try different things, build things that you would personally use (I made type.haroonazizi.com and haroonazizi.com/focus for my own usage and now I constantly get 4k+ visits per month on a 3 months old website - haha), skip some of the classes that you think does not bring you value (please don’t show this to university professors, hahah!), and again, don’t beat yourself up.
I really hope that I gave you something useful in this long email, and if you have any other questions feel free to hit me up with another email. I would be more than happy to help.
Best, Haroon