[glic3rinu]

A mix of the two approaches might yield the best results.

At work I usually go by looking for quick solutions for the very specific problems I encounter, e.g. disable echo on a terminal, send data through a socket, ...

And what I sometimes do over the weekend is to go over the problems I had and try to learn from the subject in a more generic way. e.g. learn TTY inner workings by reading the source code of python's pty.py standard library module, read the socket's documentation and understand all available socket operations, or watch some conference talk on the subject over youtube ...

This second consolidation phase has proven very useful to me. Not only because of discovering interesting gems hidden in standard libraries and other references, but also to be able to anticipate and solve really weird/low-level bugs that otherwise would have been very difficult to approach.