Build First, Learn Later

After a year of teaching beginners, I flipped my course into the exact opposite order of every textbook: build the project first, backfill the knowledge later.

The traditional path is "learn properly, then build." Students die in week three, somewhere in the syntax chapters, having forgotten why they signed up at all.

Now everyone gets something working in lesson one. Rough is fine — running is what matters. Because the feeling of "I made this" is worth more than any knowledge point: it forces you to go back and pick up everything you actually need to understand.

Don't aim to understand it all at once. Aim to break through, step by step.