30 Sept 20261 min read
Build With Your Projects, Not Just With Tutorials
Why repeatedly opening, changing, breaking, fixing, and improving my own projects has become part of how I learn.
Context
Tutorials can show you a path. Your own project forces you to make decisions when the path is no longer written for you.
There is a comfortable feeling that comes from finishing a tutorial. Everything works, the instructor explains the next step, and the code looks complete. Then I open my own project and suddenly I have to decide what comes next.
My project does not give me the answer
That is exactly why I need to interact with it more often. I have to decide where a component belongs, what data it needs, why an error happened, and whether the feature I imagined actually makes sense.
Interacting means changing things
- Add a small feature.
- Remove something that no longer makes sense.
- Read an error before asking for the answer.
- Open old code and explain it to myself.
- Try a different implementation.
- Commit the change and come back later.
The uncomfortable part is useful
When I cannot immediately solve something in my own project, there is no tutorial chapter to hide behind. That uncertainty makes me slow down and understand what I actually know.
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