A lot of great ideas here, not much to add to them.
The one thing I’d like to offer from my experience is that I have never learnt much from running dog classifiers or identifying digits. In fact, the same examples used over and over were at some point pushing me away from all this. Even though I understand their importance in offering a simple and concise example, they won’t help you take the next step in the learning process.
My way of learning has been a sort of transfer knowledge process where I take insights from the awsome work Jeremy and the team are doing, trasnfer it over to my domain and its specific problems that move me, and develope ‘unique’ (to my domain at least) solutions to all that.
It has been the only way for me to not only absorb or memorize new knowledge but really make it mine. Hope it works for you.
Kind regards,
Theodore.