Had a chat with my bootcamp TA that totally flipped how I learn coding

I was at a coffee shop in Austin last Tuesday and ran into my old TA from the 2023 batch. I told him I was stuck on tutorials, just copying code without really getting it. He said 'stop trying to build things you don't care about, pick something you actually want to use and break it down instead.' That hit different because I realized I'd been grinding on random projects for 6 months and couldnt explain basic loops without a reference. Anyone else find that shifting to personal projects made concepts stick way faster?

3 comments

3 Comments

sage_dixon16d ago

That's the thing about grinding through tutorials - you end up knowing how to follow directions but not how to solve actual problems. Personal projects force you to hit walls and figure out why your code broke, which is way more useful than copying stuff line by line. Like with my dog grooming booking site I started last year, I kept messing up the calendar integration until I actually sat down and understood date objects. A tutorial would've just handed me a working calendar snippet and I'd still be clueless about timestamps. When you care about the end result, your brain treats the learning like survival mode instead of busy work.

jesse_fisher17d ago

Man that's exactly what I needed to hear a few months back... I used to think grinding through tutorials was the only way but switching to stuff I actually wanted to use made everything click way faster for me.

the_morgan17d ago

The one time I ignored that advice @jesse_fisher I spent two weeks learning a framework I never even touched.