I most likely count as a technical person, but I couldn't resist weighing in. One key factor when I've been learning something programming-related has been to a

I most likely count as a technical person, but I couldn't resist weighing in. One key factor when I've been learning something programming-related has been to actually deal with problems that I need to solve. If you're currently puting reports together by hand, see if you can write a bit of code to do the repetitive part. If you need to filter a stream of articles, see if you can weed out the easy 80% using word matching, or some other heuristic you develop. If you have a spreadsheet to do your budgetting, see if you can replace it with a program that can fetch all the available data, and spit out relevant results.