[nickpsecurity]

Great work and fun article. You sort of already answered my question about how repeatable this is outside web development. I think having resources like StackOverflow solving most common issues and the field not having a lot of depth (barrier to entry) were critical. Might be a tad more difficult to do, say, secure systems software or hardware this way.

Determination, practice, and one-milestone-at-a-time are my main takeaways here. This benefits any field. Strange enough, it especially benefits high-assurance software because the stuff takes so much time and analysis companies might pull out financially or FOSS people loose focus/hope. INFOSEC guru Paul Karger promoted turning a big project into a series of intermediate, useful deliverables to maintain morale and provide short-term revenue from licensing/sales of intermediates. Seems same for learning, too.