Hey friends 👋
Imagine it's 2013, and there I was, copying code from a YouTube tutorial in an attempt to build my first Android app.
Why am I bringing this up now? Because this week I had the exact same experience, and it felt like a journey back in time!
Back then, I had very little knowledge in the development world. I recall following a YouTube tutorial for my first app and the code wouldn't compile. When I posted my first question on StackOverflow, I found out that I missed something basic. I had no clue what I was doing.
Moving forward, my learning pivoted away from videos to written tutorials, code samples, and eventually, documentation and open-source projects.
Fast forward to this week, I was searching for a way to replicate an App Store-like transition in SwiftUI. Unfortunately, I found nothing but a few YouTube tutorials.
At first, I was like, NO! I'm not doing that.
Watching a 15-minute video of someone typing code, making mistakes, and correcting them seems like a lifetime!
Skipping through the video wasn't a good approach either; there's no easy way I could see all the related pieces together...
I was so hesitant that I kept searching for something written for multiple of those 15 minutes... and found nothing.
I even looked in the video description and comments hoping for a link to a GitHub repository or a written tutorial.
In the end, I had no other resource than the video. So I played it and copied the code to put all the pieces in front of me.
At that moment, I remembered my first experience. It felt like a complete circle. A long journey of eleven years, and here I am copying code from a YouTube tutorial. But this time, I had more sense of what I was doing, and my code compiled!
I'm curious, how do you prefer to learn new concepts? Videos, reading, or is there another way? Let me know.
That's all for this week. Thanks for sticking around.