Went from tutorials to building my own stuff and it clicked way faster

Honestly, I spent like 3 months on Codecademy and freeCodeCamp just copying their exercises, and I could follow along fine but then I'd try to do anything on my own and freeze up. Last week I decided to build a simple calculator in JavaScript from scratch without any hand-holding, and I learned more in 2 days than I did in those whole 3 months. It was rough at first, I kept forgetting how to do loops and array stuff, but actually debugging my own broken code made it stick in my brain. Has anyone else hit that wall where tutorials feel like a crutch and you just gotta force yourself to build something real?

4 comments

4 Comments

jessica13018d ago

Oh man, that calculator project sounds exactly like what I needed to hear! I've been stuck in tutorial hell for weeks now, copying stuff but feeling like a fraud when I close the tab. So when you actually built your calculator, what was the first thing that broke and made you really have to sit there and figure it out yourself? Because I bet that moment of panic when it crashes is where the real learning happens, right? I'm trying to force myself to do the same thing but I keep chickening out and going back to the safe tutorials.

susanb3418d ago

You're overthinking this, it's just a calculator not brain surgery haha.

davis.noah18d agoMost Upvoted

Wait @susanb34 are you saying my brain surgery would go better than my calculator coding? Because I think I'd trust myself with a scalpel over handling another buggy Javascript function at this point. My first calculator crash came when I tried to chain operations and got "undefined" popping up everywhere like some kind of math ghost. Took me a solid hour to realize I forgot to store the previous result.

knight.felix18d ago

Oh that first crash is always a doozy. For me, it was when I hit the equals button and nothing happened - just a blank screen staring back at me. Turned out I had my functions all tangled up, the math was trying to run before it had the numbers. That night I spent three hours just re-reading my code line by line, and it finally clicked that order matters more than I thought. What specific part of the calculator are you most nervous about tackling first, the button clicks or the actual math logic?