Along the way, there were forums like FxZone (of Eyeball-design), which closed unfortunately, and a myriad of other tutorial sites, forums, communities (most of which had closed... what's up with that?) and finally landing on sites like CSS Zen Garden which introduced a whole new world of front end concepts.
While turning the forum into VB, I learned there were these things called subroutines or 'functions' that broke problems down to incremental chunks and got reused a lot (you can reuse code?! Why, yes) and then I learned about these things called 'databases' where you can search for things. Finally, no more text files for storage!
My dinky little router was rubbish, so I took an old PC and turned it into a router/gateway and that lead me to learn about networking.
I wanted it to be accessible from the web, so I had to learn about DNS.
Everything I learned allowed me to turn that forum into a continual learning experience where I slowly turned a script into an application and later platform.
So basically, one project turned into a learning thing and the learning thing became a goal in itself. That brought in some jobs that allowed me to learn and train on the job.
In a way, this sort of hodgepodge learning turned out to be a good thing, because I've had to touch on hardware, networking, DBA, programming. So a whole spectrum of problem solving that I doubt I would have had a chance to work on.
The most (pleasantly)frightening thing about learning is how quickly you realize how much more there is to learn. It's like firing a gun while riding atop a rocket and then trying to catch the bullet. Your goal will always going to be ahead of you.
