Tutorial Hell

Most of the tutorial videos are destroying people. If you have watched typical "Zero to Hero" courses for over six hours and still can not combine different blocks of code, you are still a beginner—not a hero.

Tutorial hell happens in the tutorial world. Tutorial world means that you learn something that you will never use anyway. For example, making a glassmorphism button with a complicated hover effect is a useless tutorial. You learn glassmorphism. But what else? What is next? Are you going to make a blog or a professional website with it? You waste your time for nothing. This is why tutorials are often just for beginners who are new to programming or web development. Those projects are only fun to build, but only a tiny percentage of them will be used in real projects. In fact, often nothing can be used.

When I was new to web development, I said to myself, "Why do tutorial videos tell everything and nothing at the same time? Why don't those tutors tell me what to do? Why do they do everything for me? I am the one who wants to get better—not, you, stupid content makers."

Those fake teachers who know nothing about HTML make a one-hour video about HTML for beginners. We know HTML syntax is very simple. But choosing the right HTML element for the right job is hard. The problem is to think about the accessibility impacts once an element gets combined with another element or attribute. For example, an HTML input element should have a label. We can use the aria-label attribute. But what is the trade-off? If we use that attribute, people are not able to see the label. Only screen readers can read those. So the best option is to have one HTML label element with a for attribute and the input element has an id attribute to programmatically connect both elements.

That is what I want from HTML tutorials. But that is not good for those fake teachers. Why? If they start telling those, people will run away from them because HTML becomes very hard. Another reason is people will find other fake teachers that hide the hard part from them. This means those who hide the truth get more money through YouTube than real teachers.

You might say that people need to start somewhere. Yes, they need to start somewhere. But they need to start somewhere correctly. If they start on the wrong spot, then fixing them will take lots of time. Motivating them to break bad habits will take more time.

Tutorial hell exists because those fake teachers do not teach them correctly. They are good at teaching themselves and show it off to people by acting like a teacher. They make money by learning.

Do not be surprised when lots of people get so many wrong ideas about web developers like the following:

• Web developers do not do research when they write code. (In fact, they can not develop anything without an internet connection.)
• Web developers can memorize and understand all concepts about web development. (Actually, they do not need to memorize and understand everything.)
• Web developers spend most of their time writing code. (The truth is that they spend most of their time thinking, planning, and designing their code.)

Those wrong ideas come from those fake teachers. They mislead people. But they keep blaming the viewers, not the students, for not taking the initiative to improve on the tutorial projects. They keep saying that the viewers are just typing the exact same thing. The likelihood for people to take the initiative is small, but they expect all the viewers will understand the message and will actually do that. Those fake teachers are ridiculous for expecting someone who has never written code—their victims—to take any initiative actions.

Tutorials mislead people who are just getting started. If you are already on the same level as me then you will not get fooled by those fake teachers. In fact, you watch less about those videos, dive into documentation, and develop something useful. You just use those tutorials for reference or to find an answer to your problem. But those beginners do not know yet about what is good or bad.

As a side note, I rarely go to YouTube and watch tutorials to solve a coding problem. I can not even remember when the last time I watched tutorials to fix bugs.

The job of teachers is to tell beginners the skills they need so that the beginners do not depend on tutorials, but can be independent. Tutorials should not make people dependent on it. They should liberate beginners from ignorance. They should liberate beginners from tutorials. If the tutorials are locking them, the tutorials take part in making people to be in tutorial hell.

I do not fully blame the tutorials, but those fake teachers should become good teachers by acknowledging that they also contribute to making people get into tutorial hell.

Tutorial videos are often entertainment videos instead of educational videos. They are fun to watch. Some of them are easy to follow even though you have no idea what you write. Then, what will you do after you complete those projects? Are you going to use them? No, you can not use them because they are copyrighted.

Reading code and inspecting code from real websites from the experts in the industry help you learn something. Real experts know how to be fancy while still being practical. They how to be unique without sacrificing web accessibility. The right teachers give you the right knowledge.

Piccalilli, Set.Studio, buildexcellentwebsit.es, Heydon Pickering, Webbed Brief, Every Layout, Inclusive Design Principles, Inclusive Components, Scott O'Hara, Adrian Roselli, Josh Comeau and CSS Wizardry are some of the good websites that you can inspect with a developer tool. Learn from real websites. They can truly help you stand out from the crowds and land a job or get a better job.

I really encourage you, if you are new, learn from real websites that serve real people. Do not put most of your energy and time into watching more tutorials or buying more courses.

I learned to use Eleventy without watching a tutorial video. I learned it by looking at the following codebase: Eleventy's documentation codebase, Eleventy's blog template, web.dev old source code, and Andy Bell's personal website codebase. All of them are available on GitHub publicly. I also learned about it through its official documentation. The result is this website that you see now.

I never buy any courses to learn web development. But I wasted hundreds of hours watching lots of videos about making dummy projects.

Let us not be naive now. Those fake teachers want you to stay foolish. They want you to keep depending on them. You keep buying their courses and watching their videos, so they can keep making money out of your ignorance. The moment you know how to learn correctly, you will rarely find yourself watching them. Why? You already know that those courses and videos can not make you go above and beyond.

Hey, beginners. If you do not believe me, why don't you develop something useful? Show your tutorial projects to everyone. You will see that they will not care about your dummy projects. For me, after I showed off my dummy projects to people, they just smiled and that was it. Those dummy projects did not give any benefits to them. When I tried making a website by myself, do you want to know what happened to me? I could not make a website. I did not know what to do at first. I did not know anything. I did not know what was right and wrong. I did not what was good and bad.

Tutorial hell happens because people have the wrong expectations and the tutors do not tell them. Those tutors keep those ignorant people to be ignorant. They do not say that learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is not enough to allow people to develop their own websites.

A good tutor should give people a chance to build the project by themselves by giving the necessary information. For example, if the tutorial is about making a fictional website to learn HTML and CSS, the tutor should provide a simple style guide and the necessary content to allow people to try themselves first. If they get stuck or want to know a different way of doing things, they can watch the tutor's video.

Also, the tutor must highlight that building a website on your own is a whole different thing and beyond the scope of this tutorial. Then, the tutor may promote the other tutorial videos. This prevents people from having wrong expectations.

You need to know user interface (UI) design, user experience (UX) design, typography, project planning, hosting, version control, debugging, writing good comments, copywriting, branding, licensing, and so many other things. To make a good website, you need to know a little about those topics. Otherwise, your website will lack something in one way.

You do not want just to write "lorem ipsum," for example. People want real content. You need to learn a bit about copywriting to give people a reason to care.

I do not suggest that you become a master in all subjects. But you should know a little about those things.

In summary, fake teachers show you that developing websites is easy. They will not tell you what I have mentioned. Those fake teachers will not dare to say that. Yet they talk about how to solve tutorial hell. This is funny because they are the ones who make the problems. But they do not realize that, or they pretend to be a fool. Because why do they want to tell you the truth if they can make lots of money? Your ignorance is beneficial for them.