I've only done a few personal projects for friends - image scrapers, PDF splitters, and such small utilities, but I've done quite a lot of work for the company

I've only done a few personal projects for friends - image scrapers, PDF splitters, and such small utilities, but I've done quite a lot of work for the company I work for (my first job, still employed there). I've learned quite a lot of theory at college, but I've learned the most by just writing code on my job. I've had quite a lot of independence and ownership of my code - complete freedom to do whatever I want to make it work - in the first ~2 years, so I've written and re-written my software every time I found that I've coded myself in the corner. After a while, I started to see patterns of which ideas work well and which don't, my understanding of programming in general has deepened a lot, and I've become able to write just about any random web-service in a reasonable amount of time. In a nutshell: just write code.