How To Escape TUTORIAL HELL As A Software Developer

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what is up I'm clearly not commuting I didn't go to the office today but I figured I'd get one of these done because I also didn't go to CrossFit so not a lot of driving today in fact zero so go on to Instagram someone sent this message in very much appreciate that friendly reminder if you want your questions answered leave them in the comments below or look for Dev leader on social media again this person sent it on Instagram you can find me on LinkedIn Nick centino on Twitter like I guess everywhere but probably Tik Tok now CU I'm in the US but that's okay I'm on every other platform um and I'm going to go read this question out for you folks um so they say I apologize for bothering you first of all it's the whole reason I'm doing this I actually don't

know if this person knows that I do code commute and answer questions I think they just found Dev leader and wanted to ask so um please send me stuff you're not bothering me I'm happy to do this so um they say I'm trying to improve as a soft engineer but I've never done an internship or worked on any projects currently completing a course with nearly 200 videos covering various topics while I feel confident at the end of each chapter I often forget what I've learned previously okay I'm not sure if this is just a personal issue but if you have any advice on how to retain information better I would appreciate it so we'll go right into this one uh in a moment but it's a two-part question um so the second part which we'll also cover is I see many videos suggesting that if

I could go back to school sorry if they could go back to school they would would maximize their experience and I've actually talked about this a little bit like I've kind of uh I don't want to say like I regretted how I spent my time in University necessarily but definitely was one of these times where like I was around a lot more people doing software me got a hiccup around people doing software stuff so um that would have been a probably an opportunity for me to maximize like interactions and stuff and I didn't but I said however I feel that most of my classes are not aligned with my interest which are in backend development of machine learning okay so um would it be beneficial for me to focus more on self-learning and working on projects related to my interest while only doing the minimum

required for my University credentials at the end of the day being an A+ student is not my goal I want to be a software engineer okay so I think this is I think this is great so thank thanks for sending this in I think there's a few different uh angles to kind of look at this stuff um and for folks that don't know if you're new new to the channel or new to to who I am uh I am a principal software engineering manager at Microsoft I've been working there for four and a half years now as an engineering manager prior to that I was an engineering manager at Magnet forensics for eight years so I've been managing engineering teams for like 12 and a half years now um I also program every single day I love to build software particularly in C best language

ever no bias at all here um and I liked C before I was working at Microsoft for what it's worth but uh that's who I am so when I try to share perspective it will be both from a software engineer perspective because I do write code and I try to layer in like as an engineering manager uh how I would kind of relate some of this stuff to people that I manage um and then the other thing I'll mention is that I try to make sure that I'm giving you different angles of how I look at stuff and I don't think there's too much that I'm going to be debating back and forth on here but generally if I have perspectives that um that I have a very strong bias for I will purposefully try to talk about the other angle so that it's not

so one-sided because that doesn't make me feel very good so with that said um I think what this person's talking about in the first part is what we actually call tutorial hell this is not a personal issue and in fact you may be someone that is uh relating to this and that's exactly why when I got this question um I think I literally said to them um thanks for sending this in I'll make a video response oh sorry someone else I said literally like this is a perfect thing for code commute um but I think that this topic is really important because a lot of people think about this right they notice or they notice that they're getting stuck even though they're putting in a lot of effort to try and learn and the reason for this in my opinion is that um tutorials are

great for walking you through things but a lot of the learning that we do is like getting stuck failing on things trying to get out of that stuck spot and it's misleading right because you would think if you're like hey I want to get better I'm going to go watch like video courses I'm going to follow along um I'm going to read the articles I'm going to get invested into this stuff but what ends up happening is like it's like a lot of other skills right and I want to give I I often refer to this and I realize it's going to sound very exaggerated but like I think it's a a good comparison to illustrate what's going on here okay so and this isn't to knock on anyone that's like trying to learn by reading articles and watching videos this is super common but

let's use an exaggerated example here of a parallel skill and this one's ironic for me because I'm like 5'4 so it's not really going to work ever for me professionally but let's pretend I wanted to get good at playing basketball it's not going to happen but if I wanted to what I if I took the approach that's similar to what this person suggesting and said okay if I want to get good at basketball I'm going to go take video courses 200 videos on playing basketball okay I'm going to watch those videos I'm going to get through a video Lesson on it and understand how this is going to set me up terribly because I'm basketball is not my thing at all you're going to learn how to dribble the ball I'm going to learn how to handle the ball in a video I'm going to

learn how to pass the ball I'm going to learn how to shoot three-pointers in a video and as I'm going through each video I finish I'm like hell yeah like that makes sense I got it I got it and then after some time goes by what happens so I get to video 50 and the first video was on dribbling the ball and all of the techniques for dribbling the ball and if I'm on video 50 that's I don't know enough basketball topics to keep this example going but think you get the idea if I'm on video 50 and we're covering different Topics by then and someone said hey Nick tell me about dribbling a basket like what like that was 50 49 videos ago like what did I retain from it right um it's it's challenging because we think about programming and software development very

much is like a like a it's a mental thing right like we got it's a it's a brain powered thing like it's not a physical thing it's just like we if we know if we know things like we should be able to do it but it's not quite like that because it's like any other's skill we have to practice it and if you're just reading or just watching videos you are not practicing it and sometimes you'll follow along with the tutorial and they'll say next go over here and click this or go over here we're going to write this code into here and you get through this video tutorial and you press play in your application and you're like holy crap it it builds and runs and you're like I I did it I'm a programmer and it's not to discredit you for doing that

right I'm not trying to make you feel bad or anything like that I think that this is a building block in learning but where did you get stuck right like you were you were kind of given the answers the whole way through and I think people don't realize that effective ways to learn mean repetition it means practicing like actually doing the thing and it means getting stuck I'm not I'm not a psychologist I can't sit here and actually give you like physiological evidence about how these things work and that's why so yes I'm just a dude uh who usually I would say like dude in a car but I'm not driving to work on this code commute episode but you get the idea I'm just a guy on the internet I have some experience I'm trying to share with you and in my experience if

you just read articles just watch videos it's very likely you will find that you get stuck in this kind of state that's feels like I'm spending time but I'm not improving I generally recommend to people to flip this thing around so the first piece of advice that I have for this person is in said um there a specific question I'm not sure if there's just a personal issue but if you have any advice on how to retain information better I would appreciate it build things build things you need to be practicing it if you're not applying it you will lose it I'll give you another example and you might think my examples are dumb but I'm just trying to give you parallels so you can see like that it's applicable to not just software development this is just a skill building thing I am from

Canada okay you might hear when I say a boot or I'm apologizing and saying sorry all the time but I'm from Canada and as Canadians I don't know I don't think this has changed I live in Seattle now but so when I was a kid which is a long time ago um in elementary school I don't know what grade grade three or four we have to start learning French so I I'm not in the part of or not from the part of Canada that was Quebec which is like you are learning French was beside that in Ontario so you learn French not R away unless you're in French immersion which I'm not uh or was not and so learn it starting I think in grade four it's kind of murky now but we do it all the way up through grade nine so grade four

five six seven eight and nine um that's like six years okay of doing French and I literally cannot speak any french I probably could speak almost zero French right after grade N I can say like jimel Nick my name is Nick oor dwe means uh today or like if you wanted to say what's the weather today I think it's like Keon F I only know that because we said it literally every single day in French class and it's burned into my brain I cannot speak any french and it's because I didn't practice it I know I have one of my best friends growing up she took French all through high school she actually went to France for like a what do you call it it's not an internship it's a I don't edit these videos when I forget the word but uh she yeah she

went she did one of her like semesters in France and it was awesome for her because she could practice French right but when you when you finish doing that and you're not practicing it I think today if I were to talk to her and I said can you speak some French to me she could probably pull a couple things together but she would be like Noah like whereas before she could speak it fluently she could hear it she could speak it but you have to practice the stuff so my advice is build things and this is what I would recommend for anyone who's feeling like they're stuck in tutorial hell or if you're just getting started and you're like hey what's a good way for me to learn I would highly recommend just reversing the order of these things that this IND idual is doing

so it's not that tutorials are bad or videos are bad in fact my main Channel Dev leader I fill with tutorials I would be a hypocrite if I'm like oh tutorials are bad don't look at them and then I go making like I literally pay a video editor to go edit my tutorial videos it's just about reversing it I would say go build things and then when you get stuck and you can't unstick yourself use a tutorial to unstick yourself okay so and then people will go well I don't know what to build and and this is where if if you've seen my other videos the example that I kind of walk people through is you have no idea where to start okay maybe or maybe you have a language that you want to work with you're like I want to learn JavaScript or I

I like working in Java or C or C++ whatever it is I would say get your language picked and this can follow um but you want to have that in mind but I would say pick a hobby you have step one pick a hobby you probably have a hobby and it can be anything like I always joke and I say Pokemon you love Pokemon that's cool that'll work great for this example but if you love soccer football whatever you want to call it like basketball if you like movies music anything that you want pick a hobby pick a couple of them so you have some examples then the next step I would say pick a form factor so what kind of thing do you want to build IOS app Android app mobile uh I just said mobile um you want maybe a crossplatform mobile app

there we go um I wanted to say web app uh so do you want to build like a web app with a front end do you just want to build a web service that's like an API um do you just want to build a a desktop application I most of my career to this day has been building desktop applications in three more years I'll be 50/50 on distributed systems versus desktop applications in my professional career so it's been quite some time that I've been building desktop apps um pick a form factor okay so we have a hobby we got a form factor and then we can layer in um something like a language or text stack right so if you said I want to go uh do iOS and I want to you know uh I'm going to pick flutter and I'm going to build

something in flutter I'm going to I've never used flutter um I'm going to build a desktop app so I'm going to use WPF and C I'm going to build a um front-end web application with you know like a full full stack web app I'm going to use Blazer so I'm going to use C and Blazer um you can you pick whatever and the the cool thing about this is like it doesn't actually matter about any specific thing you pick which is why it like you just got to start building stuff now people might jump in and argue well don't waste your time learning X or learning why I would say don't waste your time waiting to go build stuff like no I'm not picking on this person but don't waste your time watching 200 videos before you go say I'm going to go build something

the language the text stack all these things when you're practicing building stuff you can transfer that knowledge to anything else because all of the skills are built while you're building software not because you're memorizing Concepts from videos if I would say even if I had good advice for you to memorize the content from the videos and retain it it doesn't mean you're going to be able to recall it and apply it in real development scenarios maybe for some people it's just not what I would recommend so you've got your hobby picked you've got your form factor and then you have your language and text stack now I would say go build something right so if you pick Pokemon and you said I want to build a full stack website and it's going to be in C and Blazer by the way I have blaz are

tutorials I have C tutorials on dev leader if you want to check that out I have courses for learning C if you want to go learn C I got to plug stuff sometimes um now you have something to start with so what are you going to go build well we're going to go build a a pokedex we're going to build something where we can track Pokemon that we've seen in our Blazer application and you're like Nick that sounds so stupid and I'm going to tell you what do you want to do do you want to practice building software or do you want to get stuck watching videos so go build something so we're going to go build that okay and then when we get stuck on things that's when we're going to say hm maybe I need a tutorial for this okay so in in

our um in our Pokedex we need something that we can store information about the Pokemon that we've seen we need to store the information about the Pokemon themselves right they all have like an identifier maybe we could have pictures of the Pokemon so we can show them in the front end there's a million things we could go build here but you're like I'm going to need a database for this I I don't know anything about databases I've never built software before and that's totally cool because now we have to go explore things so I need to store stuff I need a database okay well what's the first step that we would do here for some people it's to go into Google right I'm got to go Google search what to do and you would go to stack Overflow but maybe for most people now it's

I'm going to go to my favorite llm and say hi I'm building something using Blazer and c and I need um a database to store my Pokemon in what database would you recommend then you could say why would you recommend give me other options and compare and contrast them right you have all these awesome tools now with AI to be able to give you some of that Insight now the other point that I want to bring up is it's not going to matter which one you pick no one's testing you on this okay so you're like I'm going to everyone's like well it's postgress is the answer here so yeah go pick postgress go stand up postgress well how the hell do you go stand up a postgress server well you're going to go search postgress on the internet you're going to go to the

site you're going to read around a little bit and you might get stuck right away you might say I have no idea what the hell I'm doing here and maybe to get postgress up and running takes you you're on day number two and you're like I just can't get postgress to run you know what this is a great opportunity for a tutoral tutorial so now you go search online for tutorial you ask an llm to explain it to you but the point is that it's all of these little instances of getting stuck where you're really going to learn things and what's unfortunate in my opinion is that a lot of people and I think it's kind of just like a human thing but like we always want shortcuts always right it doesn't matter what it is it's like if you you know if you could

have more money like how do I win the law or what's the get-rich quick scheme if you could lose weight like what's the what's the magic diet that will help me lose weight if you want to be strong like what's the cheat code to get strong if I want to learn things if I want to learn the program what tell me the best language to learn Best Tex stack and best um domain to be in so I can make the most money and be the most successful software engineer tell me that shortcut but the shortcut unfortunately is that you need to accept there's no shortcut and just start putting in the work there's things that you can optimize along the way but if you don't get started that is your biggest bottleneck in making progress so getting stuck is really helpful but you need to

be doing the work okay um so in this person's uh situation I would literally just say reverse the order of things try building things then use videos to go um you know get unstuck there now if the way I'm reading this it's it sounds like it's a video course or it's a course in general and I don't know the exact situation but they have all these videos to go through what I would recommend if you're like I need to kind of follow along with the videos to get credit or maybe you have some kind of situation like this I would just say if you don't invert everything and then do what I just suggested I would say go through a couple of videos and then try to take the concepts of that and go build with it so what you could do is you could

combine both of the things I just said into a hybrid and get a skeleton of something stood up so you're like I'm going to make my pokeddex I'm going to you know use C and Blazer and so I can build a full stack web app okay and then now you're watching your first video tutorial and it's on whatever I would say cool you need to practice what you just learned how can you go apply that to your Pokedex now that's your homework I don't know where everyone went to school obviously because I don't know where everyone's watching this from but I can remember when I was in school and we got homework or we had like even in class you go through the teacher teaches you stuff and it's like here's worksheets or here's you have to go do questions like 78 n in your

in your textbook and it was like man I hate doing stuff like no one ever wants to do the work guess when you're learning like when you're doing the stuff so like make some homework for yourself go apply things it's just it is going to be in my opinion the best way to learn okay so um I wasted a lot of time just probably saying the same thing in like 15 different ways but that's my advice on that part second part is about going back to school and the fact that it doesn't really seem aligned with um or sorry I think they're already in school but they've been hearing other people talk about going back and optimizing their time there um so I'll share like from from my experience I went to the University of waterl I went for computer engineering it was an internship

like a it's called a co-op program so every other semester for five years was an internship except there was one double backtack uh school one but anyway I had I left school having full two years of work experience because I didn't have breaks in between classes for four months work for four months classes for for four months work for four months I loved it but I hated school I thought school was the biggest waste of time until my fifth year like my very final year of school I was like hey these coures are actually related to things in software development whereas everything before felt so disconnected from anything I was doing in my internships um and I was programming all the time outside of school because I just and work because I just I like building stuff and you know my first year it was

like here's calculus here's chemistry here's physics physics and I'm like this is so dumb but okay it's first year like I get they have to get everyone on the same page and then we go into our like second semester of school or like our second year even and it was like wait a second all this stuff is like it feels so completely unrelated so for me I felt like I wasted a ton of class time because like nothing felt relevant at all but what kept me motivated was two things one is that I love the internships and I'm like that's what I'm going to be doing when I graduate so like if I like this that's a good sign but the other thing and this is just a bit of a side note because some people don't realize this and I've made videos on this

before so I'm not going to go off on too much of a tangent but when I was getting ready to go into school in Yip piic university is in Canada if you want to be called a professional software engineer it's an accredited profession so you cannot be a self-taught software engineer legally by definition and some people are going to be like what the hell that's so dumb anyone can be and I'm not I'm not gatekeeping it it's it's literally by definition it's like a lawyer a doctor engineer pick those three things like you you do not just get to be that just because you want to or you're selftaught or you did a boot camp even if you went to University univ does not mean you get to do it because I did go to university and I did go to an accredited engineering program

and I did get my fancy Canadian iron ring I am not a professional software engineer in Canada because you need I think um I don't know how many years of work experience signed off it might be like four years of work experience there's some number of years of work experience under a professional engineer they sign off on it and you need to do an ethics test and I have neither of those two things even though I went to an accredited engineering program so for me I made that choice saying I want to be that and that's why I went to University so that's why I made that choice so that was the other thing that kept me going was hey when I'm done this is one of the boxes I have to check to become a professional engineering candidate I'm waiting for the comments to

roll in about people going that's not true you anyone can be a professional engineer I'm not trying to argue it it's just how it's it's actually a law in many countries and what happens is that many businesses are just like we don't care like everyone knows it as software engineering we're just going to say that that's fine like I'm not here to go trying to change the world I'm just trying to inform you that like this is there's literally the professional uh Engineers of Ontario will contact companies that are advertising in software engineer is the title and tell them you cannot use that you need to change it I'm not making like I'm it's not my opinion I'm just telling you that that's a fact so anyway there you go so I went to University I didn't like classes I didn't think any of my

classes made sense for software engineering so I made sure my internships I was trying to you know extract as much like sort of value in terms of like software engineering as I could in Hind site definitely did not um my work ethic was not there but I knew that I liked it um and then the other thing was I was building software all the time so this person says would it be beneficial for me to focus more on self-learning yes 100% yes build stuff I don't want to sit here and tell you trade your entire personal life for building things but I'm a computer nerd I love building software so I would go in University I'd be either playing video games uh on weekends partying with my roommates cuz I had mechanical engineering roommates and one of our uh one of our roommates was a

double degree at one of the other schools so he was in business computer science so everyone else loved to party I like to party we would do that on the weekends but otherwise I'm like I'm going to the gym I'm playing video games or I'm coding stuff I'm a huge nerd so I love to build things and it allowed me to get a lot of practice if you have other Hobbies I'm not saying give them up but I would say if you're serious about trying to improve your skill you need to find some time to build things and personally well I mean you're even saying it if you feel that your school is not giving you that opportunity in your classes then you probably need to find or create that opportunity for yourself um and working on projects related or only and while only doing

the minimum yeah so another thing I'll men here is I in my entire time so 12 and a half years of hiring software Engineers I have never looked at anyone's grades ever ever the exception is probably hiring interns and not even to um not to be like oh did they get over some threshold but literally to go look and be like did they take programming classes because I need to know if they have any programming skills or if we're teaching them from the start that's it I don't care like doesn't I don't makes lit you could have perfect in every course I'm like I don't care I need to see you build software and build software in our team that's it doesn't matter I don't care if you have 100% in physics I don't care if you have over 100% because you got bonuses and

stuff it just it literally makes no difference to me now that doesn't mean I'm not proud of you for doing it I think that's great if you have awesome marks it's it's great it just doesn't for me it's not what I'm after when I'm hiring people I got to be careful how I say things sometimes because I'm sure some people are like well this guy doesn't think that it's valuable it's like no it's great and you should be proud but it's just not what I'm trying to look for when I'm hiring so um the minimum required for your University credentials like kind of within reason right I wouldn't say like ride that line and always kind of be on the Tipping Point of like am I gonna you know get to the next semester um but I would say like I I personally don't see

overinvestigation take it and maybe challenge yourself to see if there there are aspects of that that you could extract and get value of so maybe put in a little bit more effort to to explore that before you just kind of say like chemistry nah like I just don't care doesn't make sense chemistry is just unit conversions that has literally nothing to do with programming and then I would say okay I get it I hear you I also feel that way but if we're going to be challenging ing ourselves and trying to be exploring different ways different perspectives I might say hey you know what I've definitely written code before where I have data coming in from different sources maybe there's some user input and one of the users coming in has configured their settings to have um metric and another user has Imperial but everything

we store in the back end is in metric because that's the right way to do things not Imperial I how are we still using Imperial in the US I don't I don't what's going on here um so we would need to convert it and hey remember that time in chemistry now we know how to do unit conversions great remember that time in chemistry we were talking about uh significant digits and rounding that's important here so like there are some like some principles that you might be able to extract but you know I think we have to we have to challenge ourselves to kind of look for some of those things so in my opinion spend more time building stuff the other thing I would say is if you're in school I've said this to a couple of people um uh like what I did not

do well is kind of what I said earlier in this video is like take advantage of the fact that you're around other other like-minded people right um I I joke kind of jokingly said in a video before that when I was in school I kind of felt like oh man it's just a bunch of nerds and like I'm a nerd like why am I thinking this way like I'm obviously a nerd I'm a in my mid-30s is recording videos on software engineering in my room my one of my like in my home office it's not it's like my room I don't sleep here but my home office on a Friday night like I'm a nerd so why did I feel like I was above other people in that regard when what I should have been doing was trying to interact with like-minded people there were

probably um whether it's clubs or groups like robotics club or something like there were probably so many of these opportunities to just be like I'm G to go practice building stuff and I didn't do it so that might be another option um again no one it's not about like getting an A+ in your robotics Club kind of thing but it's like hey that's a good opportunity for you to practice stuff and you could put stuff like that on a resume so something to think about but I hope that helps that's my perspective on this it's already a bit over 30 minutes so um yeah I wish this person success if you're in this situation with either the tutorial hell or how to kind of think about how you approach School those are my perspectives I hope that you find them helpful and ultimately you have

to kind of Choose Your Own Adventure here I'm just a dude this is one perspective you get but you have to carve your own path so I hope that helps if you have any other questions please leave them in the comments send a message to Dev leader on social media thanks I'll see you next time