I don’t like studying. Now that I’m done with school, I realize that while I love learning, I hate formal classes and studying. How do I learn? I prefer to tackle projects as a means to learn something.

Most of the time I’m learning something related to programming.

Now, how to scope a project? Something that is not too long/hard (demotivates you) but also challenging enough so it’s interesting.

In many technologies they show tutorials to showcase the tool’s capabilities. Some tutorials are nice, but I still don’t have the patience to follow it “for the sake of following it”. I also don’t like the idea of doing something that so many people have done the exact same. Why am I doing it then?

But I’ve found myself recommending tutorials with different set of technologies or constraints. Maybe also add an UI for this. Don’t use this cloud, but that one.

I also find that this requires you to understand and change instead of doing something from scratch, which is easier to get started. Most of the time you don’t have the solution anywhere so you need to do it yourself, but most of the work is there. That is, the steps to get done.

It’s a nice compromise. And though I’d argue you need more than this to truly learn, I think it’s a nice first step 😊.