How I Study Programming Today: Watch, Build, Repeat

My routine right now is pretty simple: watch, build, repeat. It sounds almost too obvious to write down, but getting the "build" part to actually happen every time took a while to get right.

Where the watching comes from

I keep coming back to the same short list of sources instead of chasing whatever's trending that week. ByteByteGo for system design, the kind of content that breaks down how real platforms are actually put together instead of just naming the buzzwords. Nick Chapsas for C# and .NET, mostly performance details and small things I wouldn't think to check on my own. Renato Augusto and Balta for content closer to home, in Portuguese, which lands differently when I'm not translating it in my head while also trying to follow the code. And whatever Udemy course fits the specific gap I'm trying to close that month, since those tend to be more structured than a single video.

Watching alone never sticks

I used to just watch a video, feel like I understood it, and move on. That fell apart the first time I tried to use whatever I'd "learned" in an actual project and realized I couldn't reconstruct any of it without the video open next to me.

So now, after a video or a course section, I close it and try to rebuild whatever was shown from scratch, on my own. Sometimes it comes out close to the original. Most of the time it doesn't, and that gap between what I thought I understood and what I could actually reproduce is usually where the real learning happens.

Why GitHub matters here

The last piece is keeping GitHub up to date with whatever comes out of the build step. If I build something and it never leaves my machine, I can't point back to it later, and a few months from now I won't be able to tell the difference between something I actually practiced and something I just watched once and forgot. The commits give me an actual record to check against instead of relying on memory.

Where this is going

It's not a perfect system. Some weeks the build step gets skipped because I'm short on time, and I end up with a backlog of things I watched but never rebuilt. Watch, build, repeat is still the loop I keep coming back to, because the alternative, just watching more content without building anything, wasn't working.