How to escape tutorial purgatory as a new developer — or at any time in your career.

For a long time I held off from starting my own side projects because of how much I didn’t know how to do.

For every project I could think of, there were several features I had absolutely no idea how to build. I would always ask myself how I could start working on something when I didn’t even know half of what it took to finish it. I was convinced I needed to learn more before I could build anything of my own.

Welcome to Tutorial Purgatory

So, instead of building my own projects, I got stuck in what I’ll call “tutorial purgatory.” Since I felt like I learned best this way, I read and watched every tutorial I could find that seemed interesting and that I thought might apply to my own projects one day. I spent month after month doing this, filling my nights with endless videos on YouTube, Udemy, and whatever other tutorial site I stumbled across. I learned a lot, and forgot nearly as much in the process.

Don’t get me wrong. I love tutorials, and I think learning the basics from tutorials is a great way to get started. But if you’re not careful, you can end up spending way more time reading or watching tutorials than you really should.