From Tutorials to Projects: How to Actually Start Creating Web Projects as a Beginner

In my last article, I wrote about how beginner web developers never feel ready to do projects due to the overwhelming amount of information to learn and the fear of failure. They avoid doing projects and focus on just learning, trapping themselves into tutorial hell.

However, one major reason I stated was that they don't know where to begin. And in my opinion, this is the most important and common reason. 

Say you gathered the courage to face your fear and decided to build a website or app by yourself, but what will you do when you have no idea how to create it? 

You probably will spend some time staring at the blank screen of your code editor, fed up, and move back to your comfort zone. Today, let's see how you can get started with building projects.

The first thing you should always remember is that no matter how proficient you get, you will always feel fear of failure and uncertainty at times. No one can help you with this. 

Only you can help yourself by Taking Action despite your fears. Let me assure you that even experienced developers struggle with such fears and challenges as imposter syndrome. So, you are not alone.

But I can help you by giving you actionable advice that will get you started building your projects.

In my opinion, there are two important factors when it comes to building projects: creating programming logic and the development process.

Courses teach us coding and programming concepts, but most fail to teach us how to build programming logic and thinking behind the development process. What is programming logic? It is just using different coding concepts and elements to create something functional like a feature on the website or a section, etc.

This is where tutorials that showcase building projects come in. Weren't we talking about breaking out of tutorial hell? Now, am I suggesting watching more tutorials? This sounds ironic, but Yes. 

You first need to learn how to create programming logic, and the best way to learn this is by watching or reading other people's code. This is exactly what these tutorials are for.

In these tutorials, developers showcase writing code to create logic and build projects. You can learn and understand how to create logic by watching these tutorials. You can also experience how other developers approach building their projects and how development works.

This makes these tutorials a perfect starting point for beginner web developers. I also started the same way.

These tutorials are great for beginners to understand programming logic and build a few projects. But these tutorials are missing the second factor: the Development Process. 

These tutorials are heavily focused on the coding part, but building projects also involves other stages like brainstorming, planning, and designing, which make up the development process.

In these tutorials, the instructor handles the development process, which is sort of behind the scenes. When beginners build a few projects following tutorials and feel ready to build from scratch, they often get stuck and fall into another tutorial hell. 

Here, you need a development process that you can follow once you are comfortable with building programming logic. A development process is just a little guide that allows you to track your progress, keeping you on the right track, and shows you the next steps of your project.

Having a process makes you a little more certain about what you are doing and why you doing that. You don't fall off the track easily and thus end up finish your projects.

Like any other beginner, I also faced the same challenges while building projects. This is why I compiled a guide about my challenges as a beginner who struggled to build projects, how I overcame those, and how I found a beginner-friendly approach or process that helped me build my own projects from scratch.

If you are also interested in this, you can check the e-book on Amazon.