[cornflake23]

This is a great question, and useful to many others as well!

In my experience (25+ years), the first step is to realize what your main objective is if you had the big picture in your head. Then you can apply what you want to learn and work backward from there. Effective integration work might be best served by focusing on software contracts. Performance improvements might force you to think about which parts are better or worse than the required capabilities.

I sometimes take on bug fixes, UAT to force myself down paths which I would normally not encounter. This helps me dive in deeper to new areas as well as avoid those that aren’t my cup o’ tea.

I used to be able to keep a lot in my head, now I prefer only to keep the index in my head, but do the actual look updirectly in code. :-)