9 Years of "Learning to Code" and I Still Couldn't Build a To-Do App

This is going to be controversial to say, but tutorial videos have never made sense to me. It's literally the least efficient way to communicate that information. I know junior developers love these sorts of videos, but I think they're more entrainment than education.

With a webpage you can read at your own rate of understanding, you can quickly jump back to find points you may have missed or not fully understood. You can follow hyperlinks to documentation the author thinks is important. Best of all, you can copy and paste! Assuming you are a competent reader, you can usually achieve all this in a fraction of the time as well.

> You learn by breaking, not by watching.

I can't stress enough how important that statement is. I learned to code by refactoring and revising my old ideas. When I learned a new tech stack, a new library, a new pattern or a new methodology, I ended up refactoring old projects with the new mindset.

I always jokingly say that every codebase looks like crap after 2 months, because it is true. You see your own mistakes after what you've learned _through implementing it_.

Good engineers and architects know how to break down a large problem into small enough portions to be able to guesstimate whether it's possible. Then they build little prototypes for those unknown unknowns to come back with a better estimation. And those small prototypes / portions are something like a knowledge library, where you gain confidence over time when you solved and successfully implemented those already.

Bad engineers on the other hand always chase the new hype, instead of learning from their own mistakes they just rebuild the same crap all over again, assuming it will be better by using fancy new libraries. Unsuccessfully.

I look back at the beginning of the PC era, which I hated.

We had modern multi-user and multi-tasking operating systems. We had decent high-level languages.

But the PC era started with DOS, a single-user operating system. And basic, which was so unsophisticated.

But looking back later I realized that the unsophisticated operating system and the unsophisticated language... they let normal people do things. You didn't need to understand semaphores or event-driven programming to make simple single-user programs.

And I kind of see people stuck in this distracting learning environment with too many moving parts, I think back.

The problem is likely that you never started at the basics, and never learnt what you needed to solve your problem. You also have a clear idea, and try to build all of it at once. A common mistake.

You want to build a todo app? Fine.

You are going to need to have some website. Cool. You only need to google how to display “todo list” on the page. 5 minutes of html will teach you that.

Then a list. Again 5 minutes of html.

Then add an entry. 10 minutes of JavaScript.

You don’t need react. You don’t need to know closures. You don’t need lambdas. Nobody needs tailwind ever.

    “A webpage that counts down to a movie release.”
    Not an app. Not a startup. Just a janky react/tailwind page.

Consistency is key. I need it too. With 1000 things pulling me this way and that, I get the most done when I just open my IDE and do it. It's so hard though. I feel like an agoraphobic trying to leave the house. What's the big deal? Just open the IDE and start doing stuff... but it's almost physically painful to even think about... I gotta get help.

Imagine the time spent writing this blogpost that could've been spent actually learning to program. Sounds like they've never actually been learning, just planning to learn

This is the way to do it, good work and great that you posted this. The first release of my 40 million download app was held together by proverbial ducktape - yet the lessons learned from actually releasing it got me to come up with much better updates: https://willem.com/en/2018-02-21_updating-snake-97/

I assume you have heard don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good?

I’m guilty of same thing, wanting to learn something completely before putting it to use, and thus never starting the real work.

Use what you need to solve your problem. Learning frameworks never made sense to me

i am almost the exact same but its more like 20 years for me. its not like i can't code, but i have never built anything. i have used python for my grad studies so i have some level of comfort with it and can do data related tasks to some degree in it. but i have never built anything.

there is this huge like "potential well" that becomes almost impossible to leap over.

This would be a great name for a tutorial:

How to write garbage code until it barely works.

"Last week I’m in a café, rewatching the same JavaScript tutorial for the 23rd time. Next to me? A 16-year-old casually building a Discord bot that streams live sports data."

You don't learn software development by just looking at tutorials, you learn software development by solving something real, something you want to accomplish. The 16yo probably isn't as great a coder, but they wanted something, a discord bot, and they just built it. Tutorials are a dull chore. Solving real problems will teach you the stuff you actually need and give a feeling of success like no tutorial or made up training project ever can, no matter how well it is presented. Also, if you're 9 years into coding as a hobby and cannot whip up a to-do-app almost instantly you really should rethink how you spend your time and effort. Woodworking is also fun.

This is the best HackerNews content in a while.

No LLMs, no Cursor, no false promises of AGI, just some musings about coding.