How to use this website

This is a tutorial website. It provides courses which usually have 10–30 articles (or “tutorials”) inside. These aim to teach you how to do something from start to end.

The only way to really learn something, however, is by doing it a lot and trying it yourself.

Tutorials should be a guide. They help you get started and introduce you to a new world, so you can take that first step (with some confidence). They should be a reference or documentation in case you forget some detail, like which exact spelling to use when writing a piece of code.

They are not a replacement for actually putting in the work—and they never will be.

Once you try to apply a skill yourself, you will run into problems that no tutorial covers. Because you are different, and your goal is different, and your situation is different.

And even if a tutorial tells you “always do X”, you wouldn’t know why. You would disregard it, as humans do. Or forget it. But once you’ve tried something yourself, you’ll see time and time again why you “should do X”, and will never forget it.

That’s also why this website was created. To teach myself. By writing tutorials, creating images, providing code examples, I taught myself all skills on this website. The fact that other people might potentially benefit from that is an unfortunate byproduct 😉

So keep that in mind, always. Experiment with the information you get. Ask questions beyond what a tutorial covers. Try to write your own little tutorials, or create your own little projects, and you will learn the most.

Example 1: this website

To illustrate my point, let me give some examples.

The first version of this website stems from 2016. I was a very young Pandaqi. I thought my writing was of the highest quality, the website as pretty and fast as could be, and was very content.

When I looked back on the website in 2022, I realized a thousand mistakes. The website was hard to update and maintain. It was way slower than it should be. The layout was inconsistent across browsers and sometimes hard to read. Writing was clunky.

Did the mistakes come over time? No, they were always there.

Did I read a book on “how to make a good tutorial website” in the meantime? Nope.

Am I way more critical or pessimistic now? No, I’d say the reverse actually.

I simply built more websites, gained more experience, wrote tons of devlogs (for my games) and blog posts (for my Dutch blog), and improved my skills that way. Quite invisibly, without conscious effort, I had become a thousand times better at creating a website like this.

When I migrated the website to a new system, I rewrote huge chunks of the tutorials. (Not everything, as I am a perfectionist and have to tell myself “80% done is 100% done”.)

The examples, code syntax and information were still correct. (That’s unlikely to change, of course.) It’s just that they were presented badly. It’s that I now have enough experience to know what should get more explanation, and what should never have been part of a “basics” tutorial.

My tutorials on LaTeX used to just dump all the possible commands in tables. I was vaguely aware of something called “semantics”, but thought it was stupid and ignored it. Now I know how important it is. So the course has many paragraphs about it.

(What is it? It simply means that, when marking a document, you use tags and commands that say what something is rather than what it should look like. This separates structure and layout. It means the document explains itself, while you can always change the layout without issues. It’s true for LaTeX, but also for building webpages.)

More generally

These are the key elements to learning anything:

• Try it often
• Try it regularly
• Analyze and evaluate after each try ( = look critically and give yourself feedback)
• Experiment until something breaks, and you fail, and then get up again

You can never get that from reading a tutorial. Or going to school / university, for that matter. Because at school everything is still taught in the wrong way.

At school, you sit still all day and read / hear stuff. Then you get one chance to prove you understand it by writing answers to questions. If you ask why you have to learn it, or why something is the way it is, you’re most likely shut down immediately. The absolute worst way to do any teaching or learning.

You have to do it yourself. These tutorials provide a start. A guide to use along the way that tries to give intuitive understanding of concepts, and a reference to look up when you apply the skill later.

And that’s how you use this website.

• Pick a course
• Read through it once
• Don’t try to memorize it or become perfect. Merely get a vague understanding of the ideas
• Start trying the skill, over and over, using this website as your reference. (In case of doubt or forgetfulness.)
• Profit

Example 2: a soccer player

We know the above is true for learning, yet somehow we only apply it to physical activities.

If a kid goes to soccer training, what do they do?

• They regularly play a lot of soccer in a lot of ways
• If something goes wrong, they get feedback from the coach. Or they say to themselves “hmm, maybe try shooting more at an angle next time”
• Kids try cool and new stuff all the time. They experiment. They probably miss more shots than they hit.
• While falling a lot and bruising some parts of their body in the process

What do they not do?

• Get one chance to play a match, and if they don’t win, they’re failed and only get another chance next year.
• Stubbornly retry the exact same thing the exact same way and hope that it brings them something
• Read a manual on how to play soccer and memorize it
• Force kids to play soccer against their will, from 9 to 5, then make homework about soccer the rest of the evening. Under the guise of “we know best” and “it’s for your future”.

Do the right steps for five to ten years, and you’re an absolutely amazing soccer player. It won’t even feel like work.

Do the same for any other skill, and it will pay off.