How to start projects

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How i should start doing projects , should i start from scratch or should i code along the youtube’s beginner project videos?

But most of the people will suggest to directly jump into making projects from scratch by questioning approach with the help of google because it is time taking but it helps to grow skills much faster.
But what if i dont know how to question or breakdown the projects into smaller tasks.

P.s - Btw i have built couple of vanilla javascript projects for beginners from 30 days of javascript project website , it has got me the view how projects are made but it hasn’t made me independent yet . If somebody will ask me to do a basic javascript project from scratch with help of MDN and W3 resources, still i will not able to do it.

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My personal feeling is that following along with someone building a project on YouTube is sorta useless. Having someone hold your hand through an entire project, well, it feels like you aren’t learning anything. And it seems to often lead people to a place where they don’t know where to begin or how to approach a project by themselves.

It’s better to break the project up into small steps, then work through figuring out how to accomplish those steps.

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The point is to learn how to do it by doing it. Just like learning to ride a bike, you can’t just watch videos and read books.

Tutorials can be useful if they cover a specific topic you need more help with or insight into. But doing code-along videos won’t teach you much unless you make it into a learning experience by changing, breaking, fixing, and playing around with the code.

Doing a few is fine, just don’t get stuck doing tutorials. It doesn’t help.

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Then you should come to the forum and ask.
We can help you learn how to break down tasks into doable chunks.

Learning how to ask questions is an important skill that is required on the job.
So it is important to learn how to do that now.

I suggest you practice building projects through something like frontend mentor.

They give you a basic design and your job is to implement that design and build out the functionality yourself.
So they don’t tell you how to solve the problem.
They just tell you what the basic functionality is supposed to be. Then it is up to you to figure out how to build it.

That is the type of practice you need right now.

Pick a project that has some JS.
Something like this one

Read through the brief and look at the design.
Start with the basic HTML elements you can identify on the page.

Then focus on the functionality portion.

One of your first questions should be “How do I calculate someone’s age from their birthday”
Figure that out first.
Use console.logs to test your code to see if your function for calculating age works.
If you need help, google “how to get someone’s age from birth day javascript”
there are tons of answers, articles, videos to help you.

Then you figure out how to display it on the page.
Then you figure out the other functionality mentioned in the brief.
Then you start figuring out how to style it so it matches the design they gave you.

That is how you break a problem down

You first need to understand what is being asked of you.
Then you take one piece at a time.

As mentioned earlier, if you don’t know how to break it down, ask the forum for help.

The more projects you build, the more you will learn how to develop your problem solve and debugging skills.

hope that helps

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