[cincinnatus]

Solving a problem and/or building a thing you are personally intensely interested in is the main thing I see over and over for all skills. Programming, woodworking, cooking, etc. If you want to make something happen you'll figure it out and bang on walls til you break through them. There is no substitute.

[FearNotDaniel]

Absolutely. It was around 1983, I absolutely loved playing Pac-Man but as a twelve-year-old didn't have enough pocket money to keep feeding the arcade machines or to buy a games console. So I just kept hacking away at that ZX Spectrum until I had a playable version of my favourite game. I never studied CS, but around 20 years later in some random office job I discovered that Excel had some version of Basic built in, and again kept hacking away until I'd automated the most boring parts of my job. Eventually I taught myself the principles of actual software engineering instead of just flinging code together, with the help of some books and online courses, but it was always with a view to solving a specific business problem that was sitting in front of me at the time. I'm glad I learned this way, also approaching the process of software development itself as a real-world requirement rather than just theory; it makes it so much easier to recognize which patterns and techniques actually solve real problems versus those "best practices" which add unnecessary complexity when applied in the wrong context.