A practise I’ve found very fruitful in my programming journey is to do deliberate practise, even when (especially when) I’m knee deep in another problem. For me

A practise I’ve found very fruitful in my programming journey is to do deliberate practise, even when (especially when) I’m knee deep in another problem. For me this looks like an explicit “learning” directory structure where I write short examples for myself, generally to explore an unfamiliar package/module, or to work up a simple but self-contained piece of code. I keep this separate from any other active project, and I often find myself referring to my own examples to refresh my memory, or use it as starter code for similar situations in the future.