I'm a big fan of the giving myself some kind of challenge to prove out a framework or technology. Like, "build a meme site" or "build twitter" or something like

I'm a big fan of the giving myself some kind of challenge to prove out a framework or technology. Like, "build a meme site" or "build twitter" or something like that. It does two things. One, you are forced to use the technology for a real thing to solve real problems. Two, it becomes very apparent how good the documentation/community/libraries are. Both are critical because most any technology can solve most any problem you throw at it if you are willing to write enough code, but the libraries, documentation, and community make a huge difference in the day to day experience of using any language or framework.