This actually happened to me before I started my current job. I was leaving a senior-level role as a .NET developer, and was moving over to be a standard-level developer in Ruby and Python. I left mid-way through November, thanks to a ton of holiday I had booked for Christmas, and decided to join in January instead of at a time when everything winds down in a lot of companies.
My Python knowledge was non-existent, so I spent most of my time sleeping in, and working my way through a set of Python books. I worked through Learn Python The Hard Way, and Data Structures and Algorithms in Python, and although I've not done much Python this year it gave me the best of both worlds. I was able to relax through the two months off, but keep my mind in code and get over the initial impostor syndrome I'd get from joining an established team with zero experience of their tools in anger.
Frankly, I still feel like my Ruby and Python skills are beginner-level, at best, but those two months helped me hit the ground running at my new job, and nearly a year later I've come to appreciate different languages as similar in many ways. I feel that I can start a new non-trivial project and (if given enough time) I can write working code in either to achieve a task - something I didn't feel before, which I put down to the two months holiday I took.
My Python knowledge was non-existent, so I spent most of my time sleeping in, and working my way through a set of Python books. I worked through Learn Python The Hard Way, and Data Structures and Algorithms in Python, and although I've not done much Python this year it gave me the best of both worlds. I was able to relax through the two months off, but keep my mind in code and get over the initial impostor syndrome I'd get from joining an established team with zero experience of their tools in anger.
Frankly, I still feel like my Ruby and Python skills are beginner-level, at best, but those two months helped me hit the ground running at my new job, and nearly a year later I've come to appreciate different languages as similar in many ways. I feel that I can start a new non-trivial project and (if given enough time) I can write working code in either to achieve a task - something I didn't feel before, which I put down to the two months holiday I took.