Fifty pull requests beats five tutorials

1. The diet

If you want to grow your taste fast, change your information diet.

Less time on tutorials. More time on pull requests — specifically, real PRs from real projects, with real review comments, that resulted in real merges or real rejections.

The reason this works has nothing to do with the code itself. It has to do with what you're exposed to.

2. What a tutorial shows you

A tutorial shows you the final shape of an idea, polished, with the bumps removed. You see the cake. You don't see the recipe being iterated on, or the cake that came out wrong the first time, or the senior pastry chef saying no, less sugar, smaller pieces.

That's nice. It's not where taste comes from.

3. What a PR shows you

A PR shows you:

• The first attempt at a thing, with its mistakes visible.
• One or more reviewers pointing out the specific things that are off — in the exact words seniors use.
• The author defending or revising, also in real engineering language.
• The before-and-after of the fix, in the diff.

Every single comment on a real PR is one piece of taste, named, applied to a specific case, with the fix attached. There are thousands of these for free online, and they're better study material than any tutorial — because they show the negotiation between okay code and good code, which is the entire content of becoming a senior.

4. Where to find them

Two starting points, both free.

• Any large open-source project you respect — find the closed PRs page. Read them like a magazine. Pick the ones with five or more review comments; those are where the taste was happening.
• Inside your own codebase, if you have a job. Open your senior teammates' last ten merged PRs. Read the review comments first, then the diffs. Notice which suggestions changed the code and which got pushback.

You only need one of these to start. Twenty minutes of PR-reading per week, sustained over a year, will compound into taste that an equivalent amount of tutorial-watching can't touch.

5. Try it