Break the Tutorial Trap: How to Become a Better Software Engineer with Projects & Structure

Practical advice for moving beyond tutorial-following by building structured projects that teach real engineering skills.

Becoming a software engineer is no trivial task. There are different hoops one has to go through, from learning basic computer science and learning about computer programming to designing a distributed system that would have to work across the world…(drifting off) yiddi yaddi yadda.

Hands down, one of the easiest way to learn and gather information is through video tutorials given that books can easily become boring (even though I would actually suggest reading books). Which is why I also made a video version of this on youtube . The cons of tutorials are also its flaws, the main con is the fact that the tutorial focuses on a problem and gives you just the solution. But many of them would miss a crucial part, which is the process of getting to the solution. You see, the creators of tutorials would have gone through different problems and solutions before coming up with the perfect solution that they use for the tutorial, that process is exactly what you need to become a software engineer.

Software engineering is a craft, and the major way to grow is to go through the rigor of creating a solution, finding bugs, having sleepless nights because you forgot a semicolon or the fact that you forgot to free an allocated memory.

This process has to be guided also, which means you need a structure, this can be achieved by the following:

• Having a mentor
• Creating projects from begineer to advance

For mentors, you can join communities or send messages to individuals on linkedin. But I am here to talk about the structure for you. So I would suggest using tools like frontend mentor where you can find projects to work on, and it can help improve your portfolio. Most importantly, the software I would suggest is the community maintained roadmap. It contains career based roadmaps and skilled based roadmaps

And for some of them (like this backend roadmap), projects are included, ranked from beginners to advance

I wish you good luck in your software engineering journey. I have created a youtube channel dedicated to learning the building blocks of software engineering.