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When I work on anything personal, I try to limit my learning surface area as much as possible. Taking on a new language AND a new problem AND a new development environment AND new libraries etc. makes it very difficult to make headway. I try to make sure that I'm either using something I know to do something I don't know how to do, or using something I don't know to do something I've done before. That goes a long way towards limiting the places I can get stuck, and makes it quite easy to isolate problems when I do.

An important side note is that there is a difference between "Computer Science" and creating software. The two are related, but you can have a very profitable career creating software that does nothing to advance computer science (look at Joel Spolsky for a great example of how this might happen). What do you mean when you use that term?