Most of things I want to learn revolve around the things I work on the job. If you are trying to solve a particular problem, I try to find all the possible better solutions I could use to solve that problem and learn each of those things along the way. For ex: If I am working on react and we are using Flux as the state management library, I try to explore other better alternative such as Redux, Mobx etc.
I also keep track of various things which come up when learning something and in-turn learn those topics.
VS Code seems a bit of overkill to use as an editor for golang editing. As someone already mentioned in the comments, my mind is also corrupted with Vim awesomeness and vim with vim-go works shockingly every-time.