Is one of your approaches to do a bunch of code along project based tutorials until you are confident enough to create similar web sites that are in the code along tutorials? I think thats the route I wanna stay on.
I did a few, but not many.
I find them more useful when they piece a whole stack of related technologies together like ‘here’s how you make a React app with a node backend that uses authentication.’ I like those because it can be hard to see the big picture of how those all go together.
Otherwise I prefer to just list out all of the functionality my app needs, break down the bits I don’t know how to do, and then rely on documentation, blogs and stack overflow for the rest.
That said, everybody has different needs, so do what works for you.
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I did some as well. They can be useful, depending on how you approach them. My suggestion is to listen to each video or section, and then try to do the code. If you really code along to the video, it will all seem easy… all you have to do is type the same thing. Most of your learning will take place when you encounter problems. It will still seem relatively easy when you watch the video, but once you stop the video and try to build the feature yourself, you will run into problems. You might have to look things up, re-watch part of the video, etc.
Then try to modify things, add features, etc.
Also, don’t wait until you are completely confident about doing it yourself because you might never be. Programming is about problem-solving, so you will need to put yourself face to face with problems. It’s not a very comfortable thing to do at first, but you get used to it.
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Would recommend reading this thread if you missed it: Doing projects with code along videos a bad idea?
The extend I use videos to learn is to get my feet wet by learning what I could learn. I don’t do follow along code videos, as I find them hard to focus on. If I watch a video its usually a short, quick one showing off some capabilities. I also usually go on and read about it more in depth to get a better understanding.
If I want to seriously learn something, I read about it and go through it myself on my side. Until I’ve actually used it, I don’t think I’ve learned anything. Working/using whatever I want to learn usually ends up with me running into issues and figuring out how to deal with them.
I never feel confident in anything, except that I’ll eventually figure it out by sticking it out. It might take longer than expected, or be easier than expected, but its not about confidence.
Its more about understanding what your going to be learning, how hard it is for you, and your own current skills. Its very possible you know something really well and totally brain fart and spend twice as long figuring it out, but its less likely if you’ve done it tons of times before, repetition is key to mastery, but don’t think confidence is what you need, as you could be filled with confidence and not know anything haha.