I learned to code before the Internet so there was a very small amount of examples and I had to trial and error the rest. My first code was bad quality, but it

I learned to code before the Internet so there was a very small amount of examples and I had to trial and error the rest. My first code was bad quality, but it did work. After that I had many things to feel bad about from previous works and was motivated to do the next thing better, finding my own ways to improve it, not always hitting on the best way. Then FOSS started up in earnest and I could work on and learn from sources like Linux, suddenly the areas I was lacking in could jump forward and my code was more than good enough for my own foss projects. I have a liberally-licensed project used by a lot of people for a long time. But I can't find a way to make any money from it.