"Broadly speaking, there are two categories of learning:"

"Guided: Reading a tutorial, taking a course, watching a YouTube video. Anything where you're following a guide."

"Unguided: Creating your own projects from scratch, extending a tutorial, looking things up in the docs. Anything where you aren't following a guide."

"If you only follow guided resources, you'll wind up in tutorial hell. You won't develop the problem-solving skills needed to succeed as a developer."

"On the other hand, if you focus entirely on unguided learning, it'll take forever. Without an experienced guide, you'll need to reinvent every wheel, spending days or weeks solving already-solved problems."

"Let's look at some ideas for how to mix some unguided learning into guided resources."

"Making intentional mistakes"

"When you've finished, reset the code to the initial state, and minimize the tutorial. See how far you can get without looking at the tutorial. When you get stuck, pull the tutorial back up, but minimize it again once you've unblocked yourself."

"Extending tutorials"

"Building related projects"

"Finding the right balance"

"When I'm at the very beginning of a learning journey, I tend to focus primarily on guided learning."

"If you want to learn new skills quickly, it's critically important that you cultivate the right mindset."

"Mindset cultivation"

"Honestly, we learn so much more from struggling and failing than we do from effortless success. With a growth mindset, the struggle might not be fun exactly, but it feels productive, like a good workout."

"Here's the core idea behind spaced repetition: in order to strengthen a memory, you need to access it right as it's about to fade away. And every time you strengthen a memory, it lasts just a little bit longer."

"Learning in public"

"The main idea is that by publishing what we learn, we help our future selves. When we discover something new, we should create an artifact that documents it, like a blog post or a tweet or a YouTube video."

"It's the best way to uncover flaws/holes in your mental model, so you can fix them."

"By sharing what you learn, you become an active participant in the dev community. You can make friends and connections."

"the wider your skill network grows, the bigger your advantage will be when it comes to learning something new."