How I Learn Effectively: Building Real Needs With New Skills
In this short article I would like to share my experience how I learn new skills or improve current ones, although the title says everything, but I will try to provide more details and what actually can be improved while you are learning with this approach.
Popular Ways of Learning
But before jumping into our topic let's understand what kind of popular ways of learning exist. One of them and my favorite one is taking and watching courses (of course with practical projects), so it's good you can watch as much as you want, but eventually you will need to use all them out of the courses and tutorials. No I am not talking about tutorial hell, you can watch anyway you are learning, but the more you practice on your own the more you catch from it.
And when it comes to practicing on your own, you already have some understanding and maybe some practical small examples which you can use as templates or guidance for your future projects and start creating and improving and eventually making it yours! The most interesting thing that the projects you created (probably bigger and more interesting ones) you can use as even better examples for even bigger projects.
Our Structure of Learning
So now let's define the way, the structure and formula we learn 🙂 -
Decide what you want to learn
Create a project based on your needs with the stack you want to learn
Use this for creating other projects
Repeat!
What will this give?
Constantly improving projecting skills
Ensures strong and clean code bases and good architecture
Can be reused and by others
Good portfolio to showcase (especially when you are just starting your career)
Example: You need a financial app try to create it with the tech stack you need to learn, you will create it with more pleasure and will have a showcase to share with others.
Case from My Experience
I have many pet projects - more than 70, yes these kind of projects are called "pet projects", and when I was Team Lead, when my teammates came with questions like "We are starting a new project, how to structure them?", Instead of structuring them together, I just had an example from my pet projects to give them, I told just like I did, and if you have a question related to anything just ask. What this gave to us? I saved time, for organizing and managing even more things and tasks, and the teammate started exploring, thinking and taking example from others experiences, in this case from my experience.
Conclusion
With this article I wanted to share the way I learn shortly, I hope joining pet project culture be helpful on your journeys 😇.
💡 Bonus Tip: If someone says, no tutorial, no watching, you must read the documentation, it's probably is his/her preferred way, not yours, although reading the documentation is very important you should find your most productive way of learning rather than listening to others. There are different applications and tests on the internet, but I think you already know what works for you best 😉.