Build and Conquer: A Framework for Learning
How to learn a skill for life
Acquiring a new skill in tech is always an interesting challenge. There are numerous ways to go from a beginner to a pro and all of them offer unique advantages and disadvantages regardless of the difficulty of the actual skill.
Sometimes, it comes down to what kind of skill it is that you’re trying to learn. Watching tutorials on YouTube might be a good way to quickly acquire, for example, brief knowledge on a set of syntactic rules about an unfamiliar programming language. This method might help you in writing that school paper on the fundamental differences between different data structures of the language.
However, this method won’t give you any practical skills. As in, you will never learn how to apply those data structures in a working program or script. Details about the nuances of type safety, null safety, order of arguments, parameter assignments, initialization rules, global and local identifier distinctions, etc. are all small but useful tidbits of knowledge that can only be gained from building an actual application using the new programming language.
Let’s take another example. Say you’re a proficient Python programmer but you want to take your skills to the next level by learning asynchronous REST API development with FastAPI. Now you have two…
