I would invert your process. The idea that the best way to learn is by doing is correct; however, if you just decide on "I want to make my own Facebook" when yo

I would invert your process. The idea that the best way to learn is by doing is correct; however, if you just decide on "I want to make my own Facebook" when your level of knowledge is at "Hello World," you are going to have a bad time. As a learner/worker/human being, the ideal place to be is what is called a state of "flow", where the challenges you have in front of you are neither too trivial but also not too insurmountable. You want something to challenge you but also not something that will leave you completely lost. So, my advice is to just flip your process. Take whatever you are learning -- be it through a book, a tutorial you are following, etc. -- and then once you feel confident you've learned some discrete new chunk of skill, try making something on your own that leverages it. But just something that you feel could be accomplished with roughly the skillset which you now believe you have. The best projects follow the mold of "I'm pretty sure I could do [x] now, but I'm not sure." For instance, if you are learning some framework like Angular, a bad place to start would be "I want to make a real-time chat app". But as you are working through a tutorial, once you learn how to just literally put a stateless component on the screen, you might get to a stage where you feel comfortable just putting another one on the screen that does something slightly differently. Sweet, you got that down. Then, later on, you'll be introduced to managing routes; so if the tutorial you are following is a simple app that shows phones and details of the phones, make one that can show books and a collection of reviews of the books and maybe a link to where you could buy it on Amazon. And on and on and on... In this way, you are always checking for understanding by doing and can figure out where your knowledge is poor, but never dabbling into things that you have no proper mental scaffolding for which just turns into copying and pasting code you don't understand.