by Max Maxfield
I’m a big fan of having hobby projects. In addition to taking one’s mind off the toils, troubles, and tribulations of the world, I think that having a new “thing” that you want to do is the best way to set about learning how to do it.
Take adding a new programming language to your repertoire as an example. One way to do this is to wade through the language reference manual (yawn). Another approach is to come up with some algorithm or task you wish to code in this new language, and then research how to achieve this goal. Of course, I’m not saying that reading the language reference manual is a bad idea, just that it’s not the only instrument in the toolbox.