The goal: escape tutorial hell#
What an experience! I must admit that I was stuck in what professionals call “tutorial hell”. One day, I stumbled upon Web Developete’s channel on YouTube. His message? “Just do stuff!” I also stumbled upon other developers’ videos and channels, and the message from the serious ones was the same, plus “make the AI teach you”.
So, I thought: “How can I do that?” I asked a prompt generator site to create one that asks the AI to stop giving me code. Instead, it should encourage me to look things up on the Internet: official docs, Stack Overflow, Google, etc. I even mentioned that I want to get out of tutorial hell! The result? A prompt that I could copy and paste to my own profile on Claude.
From escaping to pivoting#
I do admit that I pivoted technologies a lot. One day it was Python, the other Go, the next one Rust, and finally C… And constantly writing new roadmaps… very long roadmaps! However, along the way, the AI was teaching me concepts that I didn’t completely grasp before about backend engineering.
The conclusion that I reached was: “programming languages are just tools, not the main character”. So, I was determined to finish what I start, no matter the technologies or the languages. Just to understand the important concepts that will help me improve as an engineer.
Starting small#
This blog is my first win! I’ve made this website with Hugo, Blowfish theme, GitHub Actions and hosted on GitHub Pages with my own dev domain. This victory has motivated me to continue with the flow: learn by doing. Not to let the AI rob me of the happiness of learning. I do want to think, to reason and to make my own decisions! The AI is just a helper on stuff that I might not have thought of…
Your turn#
What’s your experience with Tutorial Hell? How did you get out of it? What about AI? How do you keep it from doing all the work, and how do you learn from it?
I’m reading you! 👇