About

Hopefully, you are someone stuck in tutorial hell. I say that because its not a bad thing to be stuck in tutorial hell. We are going to climb out together and its going to be easy-ish.

There is a lot of content on the internet that targets a lot of niches. Extremely green neophytes and jaded battle-scarred veterans are however the most catered markets. However, there is a huge dearth in content for people in the middle. People who have figured out how to code and can code but it doesn't flow like a maestro in their element. You know the syntax of a for loop and the other elementary constructs of a language but you have never really built anything, other than a few scattered projects on Github that are no longer maintained or will probably not even compile today.

I'm not claiming to solve it magically for you. I don't have that magic, and arguably no one does. What I am saying is that we can learn together. We can learn from our mistakes and of those who came before us.

A brief autobiographical sketch is in order. I programmed for the fisrt time in 2004 in what I think was Java 1.5. Since then I have dabbled in multiple languages, always learning enough of the syntax to get by the first few tutorials but never really built anything. I am sure I am not the only person like that. Of course since then, there have been a lot of revolutions in the world of dissemination of technical knowhow, but everything has gotten so much more complex and I have never held a job as a programmer despite my best efforts to get one.

The question might be asked, why do I keep trying? And perhaps you should ask yourself the same question. At some level, I want to befriend the computer and to understand its lingua franca - the algorithm. Algorithms are all around us, but we have got our priorities wrong about them. At some level, a computer is capable of producing an arcane and exotic form of art - the program. The program is a wondorous piece of art and is the true miracle of our century. And I want to create. I can't sing, I can't paint but I can type bloody hell till blood oozes out of my fingers and my soul screams its mournful song. And to use it to make a to-do list in react, just feels, craven.

As far as I am concerned, there are two reasons why people get stuck in tutorial hell. First is because, we have a problem of plenty, when you have a supermarket's shelves lined with 80 million kinds of breakfast cereals, how do you even make a choice? What even would be considered a good choice? There are the Java nerds who picked it up in the last Ice Age and seem content to crunch it till rigor mortis sets in. There are the Javascript jockeys who pick a new framework every day and will fight everyone who tells them to just use react. There are the functional programming weirdos who are more concerned with making the most intricate Rube Goldberg machine to move the cereal from the shelf to their mouth (functionally of course) without lifting their fingers or moving at all. And so on and so forth.

Then to me, there is the fact that so much of programming is just tedious work. I was a product manager for the loan origination software for a year in a large Bank and while it had its moments, it just felt like bricklaying and slowly and patiently watching the developers churn out code to whatever random configuration the business and compliance departments hallucinated every week.

And its a lot like that. Solving a problem is fun, but doing a hundred leetcode hards is only really possible if you can visualize that FAANG paycheck. But its not about that.

What I have learnt through two decades of tutorial hell is that there is more to programming than getting a job. And there is more to programming than just coding. Getting your mind expanded while learning about Category Theory for the first time or just watching your computer do the thing that you want it to do (if you can keep stuck to it for that long) is a kick in itself like nothing else. Of course, the very idea of Open source software is a testament to the fact that there is more to programming. Not all programmers are artists. Not all programs are art, but there is an art to programming and artists hide in our midst.

The idea is to rekindle a sense of wonder and enjoy what we are doing. And perhaps realize that what we thought was hell was a prison of our minds and we were in tutorial heaven this whole time.