My learning environment over the years has been similar to yours. What I have found works well for me is:

• I select a thing I want to learn and look here on PM for code with similar functionality, then modify it to suit my needs.
• I keep a couple of folders with various functional Perl scripts, often named with rather long descriptive names so I can easily refer back to them.
• I comment 'trial' scripts heavily and use git (locally) to find things I can't quite remember. Git also allows me to 'see what I learned last time' when it has been a while since a given script has been worked on
• PerlBrew has been my friend!...for those times when examples just don't want to run on whatever version of Perl I am currently on
• CPAN is darn handy for finding better ways of doing things.
• Google or DuckDuckGo are indispensable for finding example Perl code
• Spend time here going through the SOP's (old and new), just looking at the code and the comments, and occasionally offering something up just to see what criticism in might receive..

Hope that might be helpful....