1. Curiosity; I'd been building hobby projects since I got my first computer as a teenager. 2. Working in real projects in the industry, while continuing to le

1. Curiosity; I'd been building hobby projects since I got my first computer as a teenager. 2. Working in real projects in the industry, while continuing to learn via hobby projects on the side. 3. Good, picky code reviewers who taught me to dig into the internals of how things work and question + test my assumptions. 4. Luck.