Join a local users group and go to meetings religiously. You will come to know who is who by attending these. Start small, take your smallest idea and work on i

Join a local users group and go to meetings religiously. You will come to know who is who by attending these. Start small, take your smallest idea and work on it. it is going to be atrocious but that is a good thing, being able to design an iterative plan to get out of a poorly designed systems is one of the marks of a good developer. Resist the temptation to scrap it all and rewrite once you figure out what you are doing. Force yourself to encapsulate the system and modularize it so that you can replace it a piece at a time. The skills you will develop by forcing yourself to clean up your old work will be invaluable.