All online tutorials are utter garbage

My favorite tutorials nowadays are the super sophisticated ones that give you a complete development environment, set up with all the extensions and tools you might possibly want, pre-filled with all the code you could possibly need to understand whatever it is they are teaching. So then you go back to your empty editor… and then what?

Online tutorials all suck.
They only ever focus on the happy path, when we actually learn through repeated failure and working through the challenges that arise. So, cool, your post with six different popups asking me to subscribe to a newsletter can give me the solution to the exact problem you designed to write about, for a very narrow set of specific circumstances. This is not how real projects work. I can think of 700 things that might go wrong before getting any of these posts to a working state, requiring deeper knowledge of the topic and troubleshooting skills, that are completely ignored.

Actual skill comes from running into issues, learning how to solve them, running into the same issue again approximately eight times judging yourself for having forgotten the solution from the previous times, and then at some point internalising how everything is actually functioning. There, you achieved true knowledge about the subject matter. The worst thing is that this entire process is something the author of a tutorial has gone through. They fucked around and fonud out. They are sourcing knowledge from their hours, days and years of frustration going through failure, and then only give you the infinitely tiny part of it that is the actual outcome.

This issue is then multiplied by the fact that most junior developers jump to their favorite search engine when they encounter an issue, which for whatever crazy reason ranks blogspam higher than actual documentation. Good documentation (and I will not rant about the bad stuff, I can only take so much blood pressure medication) will give you both good and happy paths, and also link to the source code of whatever it is you are looking at, allowing you to dive so much deeper into what is happening behind the scenes. Seriously, read some source code of libraries you’re using every once in a while. A good tutorial should always link there, too. Give your readers some stuff take away and read as homework.

I wish all tutorials gave you the complete rundown. Why did you start writing about this? What steps did you take? What are all the error messages you got thrown in your face? How did you debug them? Which documentation did you look at to fix them? What are things that might be affecting this piece of code in my environment? Just giving me a snippet of code does not teach me anything.