What this site is

Flow's Blog is a place for coding tutorials written the long way round: build the thing first, then explain it.

Most of what you will find here is web development — PHP to start with, because that is where the course on this site began, and because it is still the language most people land on when they want to make something that works before they understand why. Over time the site widens out into the other things it was built for: video editing, motion graphics, 3D, AI tools and security basics.

How the tutorials are written

Every snippet on this site was run before it was published. If a tutorial says the output is bool(false), that is because it printed bool(false) on a real machine, not because it looked right while typing.

That sounds like a small thing. It is not. Most of the frustration in learning to code comes from following a tutorial that almost works — a missing semicolon in the article, a function signature from an older version, a step the writer skipped because it was obvious to them. The screenshots here are of actual runs, errors included, because the error message is usually the part you needed to see.

A few things follow from that:

• Full examples, not fragments. If you cannot paste it and run it, it is not finished.
• The errors stay in. Where something commonly breaks, the broken version is shown first, and then the fix.
• Versions are stated. Code that worked in PHP 5 and quietly stopped working later is called out rather than left to surprise you.

Who it is for

People who are past hello world and stuck somewhere in the middle — where the syntax makes sense but you still cannot tell why your own code does not do what the tutorial's code did. That gap is where most people give up, and it is the part most tutorials skip.

No prior framework knowledge is assumed. Where a tutorial needs something installed, the install is part of the tutorial.

Who writes it

One person, not a content team. Everything here is written, coded, screenshotted and edited by the same hands, which is why it comes out slowly and why nothing goes up until it has been run.

The site has no sponsored posts and takes no payment for coverage. Where something is recommended, it is because it was used.

Getting in touch

Corrections are genuinely welcome. If a tutorial here does not work on your machine, that is worth knowing, and it gets fixed. There is a contact page for that.