For the majority of this week I've been working on building a toy framework—a flask clone. Before I came to Hacker School I thought I should learn how to use web frameworks; I'm glad I didn't spend too much time on that because it works very well to learn how they work by building one yourself. Of course mine is not very good for actual production—but I am confident that by the end, I'll have a much firmer grasp on how to pick up any framework from the work I've done implementing my own.
All I really had to do to get started was to work through the flask tutorials to learn what it does, and then through this WSGI tutorial to learn how WSGI applications (of which flask is a member) are put together. Then it was off to the races. Now I can handle routes, serve pages, handle GET and POST, run templates with variable replacement and template extension, and interact with a MongoDB database. Next I want to build conditional logic and looping into my template, then I'm going to try to build an ORM for my framework.