Stay away from Tutorials!
There is a really bad habit of mine that has stalled me from becoming a good learner/developer — and that is a tutorial hell. I would always begin some tutorial, finish 30–60 percent of it, get frustrated with the lack of skill I attain, and move on to some other tutorial.
That is not quite healthy.
So I have decided to stay away from tutorials as much as possible. One good exception is tutorials featured in official documentations. Speaking of documentation, I should RTFM.
One thing I kept hearing from various podcasts regarding learning how to learn new technologies is to build your own thing. Sure, it is a solid idea except I tried this also and always quit in the middle after trying to build one small feature for days to no avail. Especially, while learning iOS, I have hit some really hard break wall that would just discourage me to the bottom of a pit. A specific case for this was settings up social Authentication for iOS. When I looked at the Firebase and Google documentation, they mention these files called AppDelegate and ViewController, but when I try to do, as they say, there was no AppDelegate or ViewController! Surely, I was using Xcode 12 with SwiftUI lifecycle but there was some kind of lack of explanation going on on the Internet.
And thus came my second lesson from this predicament: Always try to reflect on what went wrong and how to improve. Experience is the key here. What I needed to look out for were some Youtube tutorials. However, alas, during this time, I solemnly swore that I would never use Instagram nor Youtube ever again so as to mitigate their effort to affect my mentality. My problem, specifically, for such apps were my addition and time-wasting habits. If I were to use Youtube just to look for how to achieve certain things, I should be allowed some time with videos— technical tutorials, not some lame clickbait video about how to get a better job with 300k.
So… regarding my own personal journey to learn iOS development with a full-time job that occupies 9+ hours a day, I learned that I must stay away from Udemy tutorials… and possibly Pluralsight tutorials as well (their tutorials on Swift was great, but ones on iOS development were awfully obsolete). Because of this Apple’s nature where they keep changing things like syntax and user interface, I need to look for the latest articles/videos about how to build things.
On the other hand, using Youtube as the only source of knowledge should be avoided. Just like how I learned a lot from English-Korean dictionaries and thesauruses, I should look way more into official documentation and books. And surely, I must learn how to not too hurry when I read the documentation. Always try to really understand the material and give some kind of meaning to it.
Another important point to reflect is that although I had a specific idea for what I want to build, I didn’t make this into small pieces. When you try to learn a new technology by building your own app, you barely know about this technology — which is not enough to achieve what you have in your mind. So, me trying to just ambiguously sketch the social Authorization page in my mind was not a good approach. I should have asked, “What is this Authorization for? What do we see before this Authorization? What do we see after this Authorization?” You need to come up with more reasons to build this thing. Also, you must START SMALL. Maybe a loading page and a landing page will be enough for me to spend long hours to firmly grasp the basics of iOS development and Swift.
This article sort of became long. So I will have to make it short now. Important takeaways:
- Learn by building what you have in mind.
- Plan what you want to build in molecular details.
- Start small. Do not start with fancy functionalities.
- Peruse(not just skim or casually read) the documentation’s introductory chapters.
- Be curious. When you start with the official tutorial, dissect the sample code and search for the code snippet in the documentation (like option-click on syntax in Xcode12).
- Go through the roadblocks yourself. Find references yourself!
One last thing: Autonomy is the key. Be a VERY ACTIVE RESEARCHER