Watched a 4-hour tutorial vs just building a stupid to-do list app

Spent last Sunday watching some guy code a full e-commerce site on YouTube. Learned almost nothing. Then Wednesday I sat down and made a to-do list app that saves to local storage. Finally understand event listeners and DOM manipulation after 3 months of tutorials. Has anyone else found that actually typing code beats watching someone else do it?

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hall.ruby2mo ago

Oh man, this is EXACTLY what I went through! I spent two weeks doing JavaScript courses on Udemy and felt like a genius following along until I tried to make a simple calculator and my brain just froze. So when you say the to-do list finally made DOM manipulation click for me that's huge. Here's what I'm wondering though and be real with me: when you got stuck on the to-do list, did you look up the answer right away or did you force yourself to stare at the code until you figured it out yourself? Because I notice when I cheat and peek at solutions too fast I still don't actually learn the stuff.

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felixw992mo ago

Staring at the code until my brain melted, but now I can finally make local storage work without crying.

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