I ask a lot of questions of those who do know parts of it. If I hear something I don't know or understand in a meeting I always write it down and research it later.

In a dev environment, I poke at things. Back up that config file, tweak some things, see what happens. Take stuff apart, put it back together. Revert things to put it back when I'm done. It's the dev environment, it's supposed to be shaken up and messed with.

With code, I find a good debugger for whatever new platform I'm trying to get into. Put some break points into interesting spots, step into to the function, step into, step into. See what's really happening. Inspect all the things. How does this thing actually tick? Watch it spin.

When an employer offers any time for training, I take it. I try and get as much out of it as I can. My employer offers some continuing education reimbursement. I use it.

And I try and also teach things at my place of employment. This forces me to actually challenge what I do know and really dig into the topic. Sometimes I find out what I thought I knew wasn't really true! We have a regular meeting on Monday afternoons to share and talk technology. I usually talk Kubernetes and containers on the third Mondays, digging deep into how all that stuff actually works. And it's not just me rambling for an hour, we usually get good discussion going about the focus on the talk and I end up learning something knew even though I'm the one presenting!

Make time in your work schedule to spend some time learning every week. Make yourself a 30 minute or 1 hour recurring meeting with only you.

And finally, there's probably a lot of small dead time moments you have in your life. I'm not saying make all of those focused on learning tech, but if even a third of the time you would have spent doing something else unproductive you instead catch a few more minutes of a training or listen to a lightning talk from a programming conference you'll slowly still glean new stuff and find more topics to dig into when you get a chance.