Piece by piece, googling "how to do X in regex". But that was slow and didn't have a great foundation. Then I learned Perl and started learning RegEx properly.

Piece by piece, googling "how to do X in regex". But that was slow and didn't have a great foundation. Then I learned Perl and started learning RegEx properly. Now somehow I've turned into one of those wizards I admired in the Stack overflow answers section. It wasn't until I had to teach RegEx to a junior that I realized how far I'd come.