Write your own code, get feedback, read others code. Repeat them all again, and again. At an earlier stage, building my own sizable project helped me the most.

Write your own code, get feedback, read others code. Repeat them all again, and again. At an earlier stage, building my own sizable project helped me the most. I still remember writing bunch of Java code in the middle of Iowa when I was an exchange student, which ended up helping a lot of my friends course registration in my university and got great feedback about the UI of the program. I learned a lot, especially about all the basic system building, and the best thing was that it gave me the confidence that I am capable of building something useful. Since then, one of my weekend hobbies was doing some fun project that does not need a whole lot of effort -- like making a simple dashboard for the family in Ruby, building a home automation bot in Go, writing some my own investment tool in Python, etc. It's just the same as picking up another language or any other skill: there is no one path people learn it. The way I learned English was mostly by reading many books, and many other people learn a second language mostly by watching TV shows or talking to people. There is no set path -- although there may be necessary things people would need to do regardless to achieve high-level of mastery, like talking and reading in a language -- but one thing necessary is an incentive, especially a positive one, and building confidence over time.