I've been building a lots of what's hopefully "meaningful" software for over 10 years now, at startups (others startups, and now my own), for open-source (zegl/

I've been building a lots of what's hopefully "meaningful" software for over 10 years now, at startups (others startups, and now my own), for open-source (zegl/kube-score being my most popular OSS creation), and large enterprises. I started to become interested in how computers where working when I was ~12, mainly driven by boredom. I didn't know how anything worked of course, but somehow was determined to create my own website, and struggled my way into HTML and free FTP/WWW hosting through various Swedish computer forums and guides. From there I added to my knowledge step by step, I learned CSS to make my sites less ugly, then PHP to be able to "log in", then SQL/MySQL to be able to create a "guestbook", and then some JavaScript, etc etc etc. After a few years of spending all free time at the computer, I got my first job/internship when I was 14. During my first 6 years or so as a "programmer", I don't think that I ever considered reading a book on any of the topics. I just went at it, and copy-pasted and brute-forced my way forward until things started to "click" in my head. I very vividly remember a moment when I realised that I suddenly knew how to create a website that would look exactly the way I wanted, from scratch! I was building things purely for fun, and started new projects seemingly every weekend. But I kept shipping, and somehow absorbed more and more knowledge. These days I might read a book/paper/documentation to learn about a new topic, but brute-forcing/learning-by-doing is still my favourite way to learn.