Ask HN: How do you manage self-study?

Remember that you can't learn _everything_ at once. You have to choose a focus. That could be a tool you want to exist, a hero you want to emulate, or a problem you want to solve. There's a section in Mastering Software Technique that discusses this: https://software-technique.com/ (it is a book, but one that I highly recommend for people wanting to learn software development better). Ultimately, that focus can shift over time as needed, and the most important thing about it is that it motivates you.

For me, I mostly manage self-study via projects. There are various things I'd like to build. Lately, I've been using Nim to build various tools I'd like to have, which has involved learning about different facets of Nim, and it's libraries.

For me, if what I want to learn is less concrete, having a personal wiki also helps. I currently use VimWiki at work to track what I need to write down, but anything that makes it easy to link between articles, and doesn't put too much of an editing barrier up is good.

One of the biggest practical lessons I learned after leaving college is that most of the things I learned in college are useless to me now. The philosophical lesson was that study plans and syllabi are useful, but only as a list of things you might need to know...a way of knowing what you don't know (which is very important!). But as a way of determining what you learn, you're just going to waste your time. Let your path in front of you determine which of those things you don't know is the thing you need to learn.

My educational background is Supply Chain Management. My career path forked within my first professional job as a supply chain analyst due to the simple constraint that Excel at the time wouldn't let me systematically manage inventory settings for more than 65k unique inventory SKUs. That is how I ended up learning R and SQL...my first programming languages in a long list to come. Now I manage radiofrequency sprectrum analytics for a major cellular network provider, and I algotrade commodity futures on the side. Getting from there to here was a long path of letting my current needs determine what I needed to learn.

Additionally, perhaps anecdotally, concepts that you learn have much better staying power in your memory when you have an actual need to learn them.

1. https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07K6MF8MD/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t...

Example: I need to learn HTML, JavaScript and maybe Node.js for upcoming project. I couldn't make myself open the books for more than 15 minutes but the other day I came up with a fun project that requires these and now I can’t wait to learn this stuff.