I’ve been on a 2 month binge of programming video tutorials. It started over the holidays when I watched 40 hours of tutorials in a 2 week period. I felt very empowered with the new knowledge that I was able to acquire in this brief period, and put it to good use right away by doing a major refactoring of the my company’s codebase. I’ve since been using my company’s “Investment Friday’s” to watch even more of these video tutorials - which has been awesome. Just this last Friday I dove head first into React.js, and am now finally able to understand the fundamentals of this very promising technology. So overall this has been a very good development for me, and for my productivity at work.
But have I become too obsessed with these tutorials? I now have a backload of 31GB of unwatched tutorials sitting on my computer. I also have an ever growing Google Sheet filled with about 200 tutorials spanning about 1000 hours that are now on my to-do list. I’ve even spent some considerable time collecting meta-data about each tutorial so that I can track my progress, prioritize my learning roadmap, and categorize everything.
The lure of easily acquiring knowledge by watching videos has also crowded out almost all other forms of learning. I’m reading less programming books and articles. I haven’t worked on any of my half-done side projects. I’ve only gone to one meetup in the last few months. Instead I’m just watching a ton of video lectures.
For now I’d say this is a healthy obsession. I’ve been able to level up tremendously in a short period of time. I’m going to continue to plow through more and more of these tutorials in the foreseeable future until I either run out, or I realize that I’m reaching a learning plateau. As the saying goes if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it - and right now the way I’m learning more about programming ain’t broke.