0. Find your search term! The thing or field you are looking to learn about almost certainly has a specific phrase that describes it that may or may not be intu

0. Find your search term! The thing or field you are looking to learn about almost certainly has a specific phrase that describes it that may or may not be intuitive; if you're building an internal search engine you want to look up "information retrieval". If you want to build an internet airplane, go search "high altitude platform systems". If you want to remind people to take their pills it's "medication adherence". Removing background sound from a recording is "denoising" and "speech enhancement". Finding the right terms lets you discover what others have done and pose your questions well. Search for papers and posts that mention the "plain English" version of your query until you find your actual search term. 1. If there's an introductory textbook on the field, grab it and read it. Almost nobody does this in professional life - how often do you see people reading books in the workplace? By analogy if there are solid "overview" papers recently published that outline the state of the art in a field, read through that. 2. Find experts in the field to help you pose your problem well. Papers literally have the email addresses of the author and it's not hard to find book authors. Reach out through your network and cold. Practitioners love to talk about their work and get people excited about their field. 3. Find online classes and tutorials; Udemy, Coursera, or even speciality ones like Harvard Medical. Be willing to drop a few hundred dollars to educate yourself. 4. Tinker and share. Start with "toy" or modest projects. Don't be embarrassed at having extremely limited scope. Small things (IT setup issues, misalignments, etc) are going to consume a huge amount of time but grind through it and don't be afraid to ask for help and ask dumb questions. When you find bugs or typos in others' work, speak up. See if you can get some even basic PRs landed. Start contributing to the community. Write about what you've learned so far: what's surprised you and what it seems is maybe missing. 5. Convene: is there a conference or meetup for folks who do this? Show up. If there's not, put this together. The first DevHouse we threw was a dozen folks in my living room but we kept throwing them until we had 2,000 folks taking over two blocks of Palo Alto. Convening isn't hard to do but few do it and it gives tremendous value both to the community as well as to yourself as host. Get people to give short (5min) interesting talks. Get to know folks and connect them with each other. Don't be mercenary, just seek to help however you can.