Avoiding the Tutorial Trap

Even though my focus will be SwiftUI, there’s still a ton of new stuff for me to learn: Swift, SwiftUI, Xcode, Combine… the list goes on. New programming languages, new development tools, new paradigms for describing and presenting UI views.

On top of all that, iOS developers are pushing the app quality bar higher every day. It’s insane how little mobile apps cost compared to how polished, beautiful, and genuinely useful so many of them are. There are going to be a lot of little details to obsess over if I want my app to include the bare minimum feature set that users expect today.

With so many new things to learn, and with so many high quality (and free) resources available online to learn from, I need to be careful not to fall into the tutorial trap. I don’t want to get sucked down too many rabbit holes, and I don’t want to delay actual app development in favor of “mastering” a topic that I literally just started learning. I love learning new things, but my main goal right now is to build an app, so I don’t want to let my desire to learn distract me from that.

Textbooks are great, but the fastest way to learn will be trying and failing while working on a real project that I’m passionate about. It’s okay if I don’t fully understand every line of code that goes into my app. There will be future apps (hopefully), and every new app will bring more opportunities for me to tighten up my understanding of things.