The idea behind pausing my tutorial writing projects

I started a project to write tutorial notes on concepts I learn. Read on to know why I kept that on hold for sometime

SUPRATIK SARKAR
Nov 7 · 3 min read

Few weeks back I was very eager to learn new technologies specially the web domain. I wanted to adopt the idea of sharing knowledge as I learnt. Things were going well. I completed tutorials for HTML.I also wrote two tutorials on CSS. But then I thought I must stop here. But why?

I was just googling topics I want to learn. I went through blogs, tutorials and courses. I was researching a lot on these topics. I was going through a lot of free courses. Completed a hell lot of those free ones before I bought books on those technologies to have something to refer to.

Now reading books, researching more online and completing tutorials wont simply make one an expert on any technology. You can spend hours studying a thick book on a particular framework or you can spend days going through videos on particular tech. But will you be able to build anything with simply watching?

Were you able to solve all maths problems simply by memorizing formulaes and watching the teacher solve the sums on board?Ofcourse not. What did you do to pass the test in mathematics? You not only memorized the formulas but also spent countless nights solving problems,be it from books or from sample papers.

Now what can you do to master technology? Apply the same technique.

First you learn all the syntax thoroughly. Then you think of a project idea. You draw the project outline on a piece of paper. Then you start coding your project away. And then finally you deploy your project. If you are smart, you will most probably code first on codepen.io as you get to see the results of your code immediately.Then you download the code and push the code into your github account. Then you use github pages to make your project live.

Now will you be able to code your first project completely perfect the very first time? The answer ofcourse is absolutely no. The very first time you will not be able to complete first project completely. You will be perplexed by the volumes of code you need to write, which is often much much more than what you wrote during tutorials.

Now you will try again. You will write messy codes. You will try again, then there will be bugs in your code. Then there will be mismatch in how things appear. Finally after seven to ten trials you will have your first mini project.

But no one will look at it during interviews as a remarkable project. For that they need your portfolio. A complete portfolio.

So now I am trying to focus on that. I will stop writing tutorials for a moment. I want to have complete grip over the technologies I have learnt so far. To test my command over these, I need to build a solid collection of portfolio projects.

Let the journey begin.

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