On Learning from YouTube

Search for a topic on YouTube, and you will get a plethora of tutorials. Quick to comprehensive. Foundational to advanced. Seconds to hours long.

It's good in a way – you can learn without paying a fee. You can learn it just before your interview, or you can spend days deep-diving into a subject.

But what does not work here is the detachment of the tutorials from reality. Especially when it's about writing code.

Most of the tutorials repeat examples from official documentation, and others are just a matter of rewording things.

Gone are the days when tutorials focused on best practices — writing maintainable and testable code.

Perhaps I am old school and still wandering around on how to write maintainable code or how to make my functions testable at the unit level and many such real-world problems. All I get the shallowness – the clickbait tutorials claiming to build entire application in 45 minutes.