Week 11-12 | My Love-Hate Relationship with Online Coding Tutorials.
I have a love-hate relationship with coding tutorials (on YouTube, Vimeo, and endless other 2013 forum threads...)
I spend hours on them. Sometimes (most times) bearing no fruit after the long, arduous minutes of trying to figure out what they’re saying.
They are undoubtedly helpful, of course. God bless these two guys for singlehandedly tethering my coding brain gears. My two online coding teachers are Daniel Shiffman, who runs a channel called The Coding Train. I’ve named him the Excited Coding Guy, because he’s very passionate and enthusiastic about teaching code. The other guy is named Matthew Epler, who also comes with his own sense of humour - although, unlike Daniel, he’s quite more sarcastic with a more “whatever” approach. I guess you can say Daniel is a dog person and Matthew is a cat person....
Where was I going with this?
So. In these tutorials, I learn things such as:
- How to incite random functions
- How to write your own functions
The guys both have made Processing and p5.js tutorials, all of which are divided into very clear, categorised videos with levels, which make them easier to understand and follow through. Their teaching is also great - I have to say they are the only tutorial providers I’ve come across, but for good reason. They deliver these materials very well.
I have to say, though, that as amusing and life-saving these tutorials are, they, of course, wouldn’t always be able to help me troubleshoot my own code. Sometimes sitting through four different 18-minute tutorial videos still couldn’t answer my one simple question that still lingers at the end of everything.
Bottom line? I was never a fan of online learning, but online learning while trying to adopt a new skill and that skill being programming or creative coding, takes a significant toll...
It is impossible for me to scavenge the Internet for tutorials on “I want flowers to grow in a garden and I want the flowers to be specific colours oh also it’s all based on a Table and I want the flowers to sway in the wind and to be clickable.... while a song is playing.” Right?
So often, I find myself going around in circles, with 10 tabs open, my brain fried, attempting to understand & learn what they’re teaching, but also to not take everything as copy-pasted knowledge. The most critical skill to apply here is to analyse their code, and incorporate it in our own project.
At least, ideally that’s how it would go...
But at the crux of Week 12, I found myself going in circles trying to get some answers from these tutorials and make my way through this project on my own. Sadly, most attempts have been to no avail, and this drove a wedge in the flow of my progress.
I’m not blaming Daniel nor Matthew though (who knows where I’d be without them), but I think it’s important to acknowledge that these are very unorthodox design challenges we’re facing: The challenge of looking past ourselves and sitting with the less-ambitious, more realistic goals of our project, and then the challenge of gauging whether or not relying on online resources is the way to go.
At this point, though, whatever comes of my project - whatever those flowers turn out to look or “grow” like, and whatever makes it to the final submission in the end - I still see myself visiting these two coding gurus even after this course is over. This isn’t an easy subject to tackle (and that I’ve made clear), but I want to learn more of it. I think four weeks (minus the two weeks of total tutorial-watching time, to be honest), is, as any creative project, not a mighty long time. But after this semester, with the extended timeframe, I want to actually watch those tutorials, this time not to gain something for my garden, but to follow in their footsteps attentively to create new, different messes on my own.
We’ve made it so far in this class, and I don’t think I want to stop learning just yet.
