[reificator]

In fairness to those learning through YouTube or other modern sources: I learned from books and after finishing the exercises in the books I also had no idea what a "super simple project" was, or at least what one step up from the book was.

Ultimately I learned by starting projects that were too large, hitting a roadblock, and stepping back to learn about that thing. Then starting another project and repeating.

This process took years and years before I was reasonably confident in estimating the size of a project. And to be honest even now, nearly 25 years after writing my first tiny cli trivia game, I still get it wrong sometimes, especially in a new domain.

At the end of the day estimation is hard even for veterans of the software industry.