[AustinGrandt]

Having something that I wanted to build/hack on was what helped me get started. Most people starting out focus solely on doing tutorials, but it's really hard to get things to stick for me in that scenario. Having my own project allowed for me to trouble shoot, build, and deploy my own app helped me stay motivated to learn and gave me great experience.

At the beginning, I wanted to hack on simple things like creating a blog or twitter clone which pieces of can be found in tutorials. As you get more experience you can build increasingly complex things in shorter time spans.