Why I Believe Doing Is the Best Way to Learn Software Development

When I started building personal projects, I wasn’t trying to learn theory — I was solving small, interesting problems. But over time, I realized that this “learn by doing” approach had become my greatest strength.

From setting up servers to debugging code that crashed at 2 a.m., every failure taught me something that documentation couldn’t. I understood networking better by breaking my Cloudflare tunnel once. I learned persistence because Proxmox VMs don’t always boot right the first time.

Theory gives you direction, but doing gives you depth. Every self-hosted project, every retry, and every “it finally works” moment turned abstract knowledge into intuition.

Takeaway:
Learning by building forces you to face real errors, not ideal examples. That’s why I believe doing isn’t just the best way to learn — it’s the only way to truly understand software development.