How to effectively learn new stuff as a software engineer?

Have you been trying to learn new things like watching lots of tutorials and after that you feel like you know nothing? Yes you actually know nothing because you have been doing it the wrong way. Are you are a victim of tutorial hell? Let me give you some cure.

How do you go about learning new stuff and never forget it?

Research about the technology that you want to learn

Let’s say you want to learn Angular, search about something like what’s needed for an Angular app to be up and running (stuff like components, dependency injection, routing, state management, etc). Make a task list listing each and every concept.

Now it is time to learn the new stuff

Some devs prefer to follow official documentation, some prefer following blog tutorials, while some prefer following video tutorials. The approach that you will use here is the same. Search for something like “Angular crash course for beginners”. Don’t just pick a random tutorial. Choose something that is going to teach you the fundamentals through building a project and that is what project based learning looks like.

The best way of learning is by doing, so follow along your tutor, as he does X you also do X. Grab the concepts and try to understand how he is doing it. After you finish building your project from the tutorial give your time some rest.

After some time maybe 24 hrs, get your hands on the keyboard. Now you have to build something on you own. Try building something similar from the tutorial. Implement the concepts that you learnt from the previous tutorial. I know it’s your first time doing it so it’s going to be hard but don’t worry, stackoverflow is your best friend.

After building your project revisit your task list. Check if you managed to understand the concepts that you listed. If yes make some notes describing how you implemented each topic and after that, you are good to go, start building projects.

This is the exact strategy that I use whenever I want to learn anything new. I hope this was helpful. If you have any additions let me know in the comments.