One of the most important skills that you need to becoming a developer is learning how to research for things through documentation and articles.
This is a completely normal part of the learning process and a vital skill that is needed.
The purpose of the certification projects is to learn how to build something from scratch, debug your own code, make mistakes, research for answers in documentation and articles.
Your are on the right track and not doing anything wrong.
I understand where you are coming from but I would suggest approaching this in a different manner.
There is nothing wrong with asking for help on projects or getting help from articles or documentation. That is the correct way to learn and you will learn much faster that way then trying to do everything on your own.
The more practice, time and experience you have, then you will be able to become more independetn and build things more on your own. But you will still have times where you will get stuck and all of your efforts won’t be enough. That is when you will need to consult with other resources or ask for help.
One of the things, that works against juniors on their first job is that they spin their wheels for way to long before getting help because they want to do everything 100% on their own.
I remember when I was on my first job, wanting to figure out a problem on my own without any help. But I was spinning my wheels for hours and all of my attempts weren’t getting to a solution.
So I caved and asked for help and a senior on the project was able to help me see what I was missing and get to the right answer. In that moment, I realized that I was close to getting the answer but was missing a piece of the puzzle. If I hadn’t asked for help, then I would have wasted more time, and not have learned from that senior.
Overall, my advice is to not spin your wheels forever trying to do everything on your own.
If you are stuck or need extra clarification on stuff, then just ask for help.
Another benefit to asking for help is that people will be able to see your code and offer suggestions on better ways to do things which will make you a stronger developer in the end.
For any of the certification projects, I would always start with the HTML markup first and go through each of the user stories one at a time.
For example, if you are working through the survey form project and confused on a user story, trying googling around or ask the forum on how to approach it.
The forum is not going to give you answer out right. But they will help you break down the problem and guide you in the right directions so you better understand how to solve it.
As a programmer you learn by doing.
You will make 100’s of mistakes and that is totally normal because that is how you learn.
The people who end up making it as developers build tons of stuff and make tons of mistakes along the way. But it is through that practice, research, asking questions that they are able to learn more and develop their skills.
I remember when I was first learning and being frustrated that I wasn’t able to figure this stuff out 100% on my own too. But then I realized that my way of thinking wasn’t correct.
The more I tried things, researched, broke things, kept building projects and learning from my peers was the turning point to when I was able to develop the skills to be professional and land my first job.
I know that it is frustrating in the beginning but this experience is completely normal and part of learning. Because being a developer is learning how to manage frustrating experiences and learning how to work through them.
Hope that helps