Planning Your Escape from Tutorial Hell

Shannon Crabill — Front End Software EngineerSkip to content

I’ve previously written about doing tutorial based projects and how it’s not a bad thing.

What can happen, is that your project looks like everyone else’s who did the same tutorial.

Again, this is not a bad thing.

But you can take your learning a step further by adding features onto those projects.

Here are some ideas to get you started

Automation

• Automatically deploy changes each time a git repo is updated

CRUD operations

• If a user can create items as part of your project, can they edit them as well?

Deploy

• Migrate your backend database to Postgres and host on Heroku.
• Automatically deploy your frontend to Netlify or Vercel.

Error handling

• What happens if a user tries to navigate away from a page while they were filling out a form field?
• What if there is no result from an API query?

Form validation

• Are there any form fields are required or nullable?
• What happens if a user enters a string when a field is only meant to access numbers?

How To

• A blog post, video, tutorial, etc on how you built a new feature or solved a problem.

oAuth

• Give users the ability to login with Google, Facebook, etc

Offline access

• What does a user see if there is a slow connection? Do they see a blank screen or some content?
• Store changes in the browser with a service worker until database access is restored

Permissions

• If a user is logged in, should they be able to view assets created by another user?

Refactor

• Take a look at your code and see if there are opportunities to DRY it up.
• Incorporate arrow functions, swap var instances for let or const, incorporate asynchronous functions.
• Remove console.log(), debug() and TODO comments from deployed code.

Styling

• Better rendering for mobile, dark/light mode toggle, make sure it’s accessible, etc.

Security

• Are there any risks of exposed API keys or sensitive user data?
• Is CORS enabled?

Tests

• Write test to validate functions are outputting the expected results.

Uses

• A uses or about page can tell the story of how you build your project, technologies used, creative process, etc.