Tutorials on topic X, Y, and Z. You see them everywhere on the web. I’m a tutorial writer myself. But just following them doesn’t mean you will be a professional developer.

I’m sorry if that has burst your bubble, but tutorials are simply not going to make you the professional developer you dream of becoming.

So what is the purpose of developer tutorials anyway? Why should or shouldn’t we follow them? In this article, I want to show you all the answers to these questions.

1. Why Do We Follow Tutorials?

Why do you follow tutorials about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or any other language, library, or framework?

Maybe you hope that this particular tutorial is going to give you a head start on the topic so you can save time. Or you quickly want to grab the idea or possibilities of that technique so you can implement it yourself.

Well, my answer would be to just get an introduction to a particular topic or to get inspiration from someone else’s solution to a problem.

But it should never be to make you a pro in technique X, Y, or Z because that’s not going to happen.

Clickbait titles like “I Became a Professional Developer With X in Just 5 Days” are not going to deliver on that promise. They will only make you familiar with certain techniques or terms.

So follow tutorials to get inspired, to learn something new, but never with the expectation to become a master from those tutorials alone.

2. What Will Make You a Professional Developer?

Now it’s clear that nobody is going to become a professional developer by only following tutorials. What will make you a professional developer? How can you become one?

In my opinion, that answer is very simple: Try, fail, learn, repeat.

Nothing more!

A professional or experienced developer has gone through this process a lot. And I mean a lot! Their entire career has probably been all about that.

So if you want to learn something about JavaScript, for example, you can follow a tutorial to learn the basics. After that, you need to practice it yourself several times. You need to make mistakes to learn how to handle errors.

It’s a natural process. Like babies grow up, learn to crawl, stand, walk, fall. So don’t be afraid to fail.

In my opinion, a professional developer is not afraid to tell you, “I don’t know.” A professional developer should be eager to learn by making mistakes.

3. What Should We Do Instead?

We all shouldn’t spend too much time on tutorials. No, we should spend most of our time building things.

Building things to try things out, to make mistakes, and to learn so we can build up our knowledge and experience.

Because that’s what has the most value in our jobs!

The next time you want to learn something new, build a small demo and search only for specific things like “how to use the arrow function in JavaScript” or “how to use CSS Grid” and pick what you need out of it.

After that, you must experiment with it as long as you need to understand how it works.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! I hope you learned something new that can help you along the way to becoming a professional developer!

Do you want to learn JavaScript the easy way? I’m working on a set of project to teach you JavaScript in a low-barrier way, so you can build you own interactive ui components 👍

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