That $70 Udemy sale got me to stop watching tutorials and actually code something

I kept buying courses and never finishing them. Two weekends ago I forced myself to build a stupid little todo list app without following along with a video. Took me 8 hours of googling and swearing but now I actually understand how fetch() works. Has anyone else found that just building something broken teaches you more than another "masterclass"?

2 comments

2 Comments

smith.ray7d agoMost Upvoted

The todo list app is basically the rite of passage for this whole thing. I did the same thing with a weather app that just showed the temp and condition. Three days of messing with an API key before I realized I was calling the wrong endpoint. That kind of failure sticks with you way better than any tutorial where everything works perfectly. Plus when you finally get it working you remember every single mistake you made along the way. Those "masterclass" courses just hand you the answers, but you never learn how to find them yourself. Breaking stuff and fixing it is the real teacher.

michael_bennett116d agoMost Upvoted

Man I've got one of those scars too. Spent a whole weekend building a recipe app that was supposed to pull data from Spoonacular. Wrote 200 lines of code before I realized I didn't even have the right base URL for the API. Kept getting 404 errors and thought my auth token was broken. Tried regenerating keys like 6 times before I actually read the documentation. That moment when I finally copy pasted the right endpoint and saw data come through was pure relief. You remember that feeling way more than any smooth tutorial walkthrough. Those masterclass courses would have given me the correct URL on page 1 and I would have learned nothing.