Cal Evans asked the following question on Twitter:

Learning is important for developers. But different people learn different ways. How do you learn? (not a twitter poll, just reply. Oh and RT to reach the vast majority of PHP developers who don’t follow me.) 🙂

And so I answered:

videos, websites and developing stuff on my own. BY developing anything you hit challenges you need to overcome. So creating a personal project is always a good thing and a great way to learn new stuff. When the project is done. Launch and start making money

I really recommend starting a private project. Either one you believe you could make a business out of, or just one that solves a problem you have. You will also experience that the project will evolve and you will continue to learn new things. You will add features to it and by doing this you will learn more.

Here is a small list of private projects I’ve made while learning a language or something new:

Visual Basic:

Created an HTML editor that had an integrated FTP client (this was before DreamWeaver had one). It was a code only thing, not a WYSIWYG-editor. Started creating it on VB1.0 and continued until VB4.

Also had a nice image thumbnail selector using a plugin. Also got a license so it could show GIF-images.

Technologies learned: VB, FTP-connections and FTP-upload/download.

Delphi

Ported the editor to Delphi and could then leave the FTP-OSX as Delphi could do this on it’s own.

Technologies learned: Delphi, a bit of object oriented programming.

PHP

Numerous CMS-solutions and a webshop. Also created other different stuff.

Technologies learned: PHP, Apache, Linux, mySQL.

C#

Numerous solutions at Norsk Telegrambyrå – Norwegian News Agency. One of my proudest software is the Normalizer which uses a Saxon library to transform XML-files using XSLT2.

Technologies learned: C#, SQL-server, Elastic Search, MessageQueueing

Angular / Elastic Search:

Created a Agency messages viewer. In this project I also used Elastic Search to index all the messages from the News Agencies NTB subscribed to.

Technologies learned: C#, AngularJS (1.x), Elastic Search.