[nareshv]

When you cannot work with other experience people or participate in open-source projects. Try these things.

1. Take a task and implement it in the most laziest way (like implementing everything in a single code file)

2. Try to make the implementation "look beautiful" (with proper indentation, etc)

3. Try to make the instructions in your code analyze the return codes, check the input parameters to functions, catch exceptions, split them into various files, functions, classes etc by adding more code.

Third step is where you will try to learn more from the programming language that you have chosen. See https://gist.github.com/nareshv/50fa0884d09622792e34 for example

Once you master the step-3, you will always do begin with these things when you start implementing your project.

Source: Personal experience.