Why everyone tells you build projects
Published: 2023-07-28 03:00:09

If you have ever tried to learn to code, you probably have heard the statement ‘just build projects’. I have heard it a billion times and sometimes get irritated by it, i mean how would someone expect you to build something when you lack the skills to, shouldn’t you learn the concepts first and then use those to build? Sounds weird at first but the number of people who recommend you do this is just too vast, and infact gurus in this area do too, everyone can’t be possibly wrong can they? So lets talk about the benefits of doing that and why everyone recommends it, i must give a disclaimer before i begin, the views i am going to air out in this article will be based on what i have seen, experienced and learnt concerning this matter, no research was done prior to writing this article, no youtube video was watched, no article read, nothing.

These are pure few months experience, so i will urge you to take this with a grain of salt(or sugar).

**1. You learn by doing**

As a beginner, the most important statement or phrase you will need to remember is this one. This is not even programming specific, in all aspects of life, you will only master stuff by doing them. You can’t learn to cook by acquiring some theoretical knowledge from a food production course you did for a few months, or learn how to play the guitar by watching an instructor playing on youtube. It’s by getting your hands that things begin to click.

If you are like me, this should be good news, i don’t enjoy learning stuff if i can’t see the benefits for, (probably why i failed secondary school), so the idea of learning something and immediately being able to implement it is just pure fun. Like i said this statement is probably the most important one you will need in your journey to learning code, and it is the most important point in this entire article, so the rest of the points will be just be a supplement to this one. So always remember, you learn by doing, if you don’t do, you don’t learn.

But do i just start by doing? Yes. Where do i start? The fact that you do not know anything should tell you that ‘just build projects’ doesn’t mean just build ignorantly, so my process of learning to code goes like so, ‘find a project, start coding it, get stuck, find a solution on what you are stuck on and repeat the process over and over again’. If you completely know nothing from the beginning, then you know that your process should start with learning what is necessary.

**2. You get to know your knowledge gaps**

This is really clear and straight forward, right from the beginning, building a project will expose what you do and do not know, sometimes we feel we have gotten it but actually haven’t, CSS is one good example, i used to think i know html and CSS until i started working on real world project, it was then that i realised that CSS is more complicated than even some programming language(my opinion). It starts simple but as you begin working on bigger projects, it will make you appreciate the presence of frameworks. One thing about theoretical learning is that it gives a false sense of knowledge, and to a certain extent, that sense of knowing is actually true, when you spend some time reading and doing a few exercises on a certain topics, you get to know about it, but to retain that information, you need to spent a lot of time putting it into practice, but if you just do it once and move on to other things, it is quickly forgotten. The danger is since you have studied about it, you will always feel like you know it, its only when you decide to sit down and try to do something with that thing that you realise you really haven’t grasped it.

**3. You learn concepts and immediately see the use cases**

One of the most difficult things when learning to code is being able to see where to use this and that, and understanding concepts really is about applying them to real world scenarios, if you can’t do that, you have not learn’t anything. Say you are learning about loops in JavaScript, the first time it clicks and you feel you have gotten will be amazing, you will be taught that to count to a hundred, you can either manually print them using console.log(number) or you can use a while loop. That is good enough but guess who is going to hire you to write programs that count to 100? No one. So you have to now figure out where in my code can i use this, if that is the case, then your learning now comprises of two part, learning the concept and then figuring where to use it. This to me looks like adding more work to something already complicated. If you decide to build something on the other hand, you may come across a feature that requires you to output to the screen a list of items in an unordered list, maybe ingredients of a recipe, you will then have to do a few searches and you will come across a loop, now you only need to learn it and implement. That to me is a much better procedure than the first. I believe we’ve all been faced with problems at one point in our lives, what did you do? You had to start looking for solutions to the problem, you did not start by looking for a solution to a problem and then wait for the problem to arrive. Programming is all about problem solving. So the same approach should be employed, look for a project, start working on it, get stuck, find a solution on what you are stuck on and then repeat the process over and over again. That is the only way you are going to learn, if you think there is a better way, then try it.

**4. It will speed up your job search**

To be fair, no one is going to hire you because you read five books on programming, watched countless videos on Youtube or even because you read this article. At the end of the day, employers want to see what you can do with the skills you claim you have, in fact i am not sure how you are even going to find yourself in front of an interviewer answering questions and solving leetcode problems if you have no projects to your name. It is the projects you put on a portfolio that potential companies will look at and invite you, so if you spend time building projects rather than gaining theoretical knowledge, you will actually build your portfolio and grow your resume much faster because you will be building during your learning. I will suggest you have a big project in mind, start working on it as soon as you become comfortable with the tech you have chosen, and follow the rule, build, get stuck, find solutions to what you are stuck with and repeat. But this time around let it be more broad, when you find something to learn, make sure you learn it thoroughly, build small projects with it aside from the big one, then and only then should you go back to the main project. When you are done, you now have two things as benefits, first you have acquired knowledge, and you have just added a project to your portfolio.

I hope this makes you understand why people ask you to build projects every time, its really the only to learn how to code. So what are you waiting for, grab that laptop, open up the editor start hacking.

Good Luck…