I built webpages and figured out CSS well enough where I understood how to use it to do most standard things. I learned how to use jQuery to do custom behavior

I built webpages and figured out CSS well enough where I understood how to use it to do most standard things. I learned how to use jQuery to do custom behavior such as setting width on certain elements depending on the browser window size (which I now know I should have been doing via CSS), animating, etc. I figured out how to use LESS functionally, if not structure my HTML & CSS well enough to take huge advantage of it. I built a basic homepage in Ruby on Rails using Twitter Bootstrap with SASS, without really understanding SASS that well except that it looked similar to LESS. I knew nothing about best practices - nobody taught me anything like that before getting that first position. I hackishly created stuff, including a WordPress plugin that pulls Twitter JSON tweet data for a particular user & displayed it at the end of each post (without knowing about PHP's JSON decoding helper method) - this was for an interview that I did in about 1 day (but I did not get called back, probably because I did such horrible things such as manually parse the JSON into the strings I wanted). For me, I happened into a good match since the non-profit needed someone to do frontend and learn some stuff like a client-side MVC framework & Node.js. I was desperate for any career-track job & zoomed in on web development, and the non-profit needed someone they could get as cheaply as possible, yet allow the person to grow while in the job. I think they got a lot more than they expected in me - I have far exceeded expectations at both of my jobs so far.