>You have to take on the pain before the learning can alleviate it, if you try to skip the pain then you have only a superficial idea of what you're talking about. > [...] > Each of these tasks I am setting for myself needs to be answered by consulting tutorials and references, but if I just follow a tutorial I will not build true knowledge, I will just know how to do things when someone is holding my hand.

That makes so much sense, thanks for the advice. I struggle with this too much nowadays, I just try too much to reach perfection too soon when learning new technologies. Thinking about this made me realize how this wasn't how I started when I was younger. I wasn't going for perfection, I was going for something that worked. Slowly afterward I learned the more technical parts, mostly by need, and the best practice, first by need, but then by desire. Nowadays I think that because I can handle some pretty technical knowledge, I can start by learning that, but seems like I waste quite a bit of time doing this and it just doesn't stick in my head.

Next time I'll learn something, I'll start that way, a crude experimentation, and then see from there the next steps. Screw the best practice, that'll just be another experimentation down the line, could even be some rewrite of previous experimentation.