Whether it’s a form of note-taking or regular repetition or the like, what are some self-education techniques and tools you’ve developed to help yourself learn on your own?
It’s always interesting imo to read about how some folks teach themselves different stuff.
For programming languages, it helps to find a task that actually fits the language well.
I learned Python as a junior sysadmin in the early 2000s specifically because it was the best language for plugging together different Internet services. The senior sysadmin on my team had written a piece of code in Python to migrate users from one email server to another, by connecting with IMAP to each server and transferring their mail. I needed to maintain this code, so I studied up on Python specifically focusing on the email libraries.
I was coming from Perl, which was the best language at the time for certain sysadmin tasks (like logs analysis). But Python’s built-in libraries made it really easy to work with email servers, web servers, and so on. One language feature I really appreciated was the exception system, where many errors that might pass unchecked in C or Perl (and produce unpredictable behavior later) would instead crash the program with a useful diagnostic message.
I learned Haskell several years later because I’d gone to work in Silicon Valley and all the cool CS nerds were into Haskell. I didn’t find a task that actually needed it until I found myself working on a problem that involved both text parsing and combinatorics. You need to express math facts about trees of strings? Haskell is the right tool for the job.
I’d learned elementary C in high school, but I’m not sure I really got C until I had picked up an electronics hobby in my 30s and built myself a blinky bike light controlled by an AVR microcontroller. C on an 8-bit Harvard-architecture machine is way different from C on i386 or x86_64 Linux.