[ungawatkt]

I have a "standard" project to work on for new languages, which has enough complexity to get me coding things idiomatically by the end, but since it's something I've done before I don't need to worry much about the topic at hand.

The project is a hurricane modelling and visualization program, which is pretty specific to my experiences, but having that to riff on has been my way of learning scala, python, c#, and (soon, in theory) Go.

[notapenny]

I've used that approach for both front-end and back-end development as well and it works quite nicely. Its really useful to have something where you don't need to worry about any sort of design/what/how to build and can just focus on the actual language.