What should I do after learning a language?

[Appyboi]

I've learnt three or four programming languages like C++, C, python and a bit of javascript after being stuck in tutorial video hell. What should I do next to actually learn to implement the languages to solve real-world problems? A lot of people say about working on open source projects, but how do I exactly go about doing this? Please share any source that can help me.

 

[parakram]

You can start by building something from scratch. It can be something that helps you, like a todo list that syncs with your Google account, or a reminder app that works with Alexa. Basically, anything that translates your knowledge into providing one single benefit in real world applications.

If you want to go the open source route, find a semi-popular library/package on github for the language you learnt. Go to its issues on Github and see the bugs or feature requests that are raised by other people. Try to implement that and raise a pull request for integration into the master code. This is a practical way to learn as well as a beginning of a public Github portfolio that you can showcase to others.

 

[mcfly]

First learn Git and get familiar with versioning and branching. Try to make a small project with a few friends on GitHub to get familiar with it (this could be an assignment from college too).
Once you’re done with this, you’ll be ready to contribute.
search around GitHub for some small projects to begin with. You can contribute to anything that’s available (that’s how open source on GitHub works). It doesn’t have to be some super popular open source project.
eventually you’ll get familiar to how large code bases are structured and work, and then you can contribute/build bigger projects on your own.
one excellent way to contribute to open source projects is to write test cases. This way you’ll be able to contribute without having a very deep knowledge of the codebase and also learn how testing works.

 

[Appyboi]

@parakram and @mcfly Thanks for the reply and suggestions. I am currently learning git and getting familiar with it and will be looking forward to making small contributions to some projects.