Stop watching tutorials and build something ugly this weekend

I spent 3 weeks watching Python videos and couldnt make anything stick. Last Friday I forced myself to build a stupid little to-do list app, no help, just typing my way through errors. It took 6 hours and the code is a mess but I finally understand how loops and functions fit together. The confusion only made sense once I had a broken project to fix. Try making a calculator or a quiz game, anything small and dumb. Has anyone else hit that point where tutorials just stop helping and you have to dive in?

1 comments

1 Comment

laura_black3110d agoTop Commenter

Honestly I used to be the opposite, I thought watching videos was the only safe way to learn and that messing up meant I was dumb. But last month I tried to copy a weather app from a tutorial and just got lost, so I quit and built a stupid dice roller instead. It took forever and my variables were all over the place, but when I broke the logic and had to trace it line by line, something just clicked. Now I start every new thing by typing out a rough version first, even if it's garbage, and only look up docs when I get stuck for real. That broken dice roller taught me more than 20 hours of perfect code walkthroughs ever did, and now I get why people say just build it. You ever find that you learn better when you have a mess to untangle?