Learning software development is difficult and retaining the information is harder. So how can you improve your retention rate?

The mistake most self-paced learners (including myself) make is relying on methods to learn; studying the content and relying on memory to remember. Just as we did in school. But in the real world, this model will not help you much.

When starting to learn software development, understand the fundamentals and learn the patterns. The best way to do this is using 3 approaches:👇🏽

1. Work on complex, real-world projects. This will help you understand how the development process relates to real-life functions. Try an e-commerce project or school management system.

2. Work on a simpler project to help keep the momentum when the first project gets difficult.

3. Study the fundamentals of software development. This was something I struggled to fully understand when I began my coding journey. I immediately jumped into building an e-commerce project with React, without fully grasping the fundamentals of JavaScript. Needless to say, I ended up learning JavaScript 101 through FreeCodeCamp, which now made it easier for me to understand front-end frameworks.

4. Collaborate with other developers to build full-stack projects. This will help you understand the software development cycle, git processes, issues, pull requests and merging changes on GitHub, among other things. When you're coding alone, the software development cycle is pretty short and does not expose you to the full scale of working in a team. You also don't get feedback from senior developers who can also teach you more than you can learn on your own.

5. Contribute to open source :). I will heavily vouch for open source because you'll learn how to contribute to an already established entity. You'll also learn software development best practices from more established developers and tech professionals, who have vast experience working for organizations across the globe.