[busterarm]

I also grew up dirt poor, had a C-64, etc. I'm a little less than a decade younger than you.

I taught myself to program, but very poorly. I had a reasonably good education through high school, but nothing that helped developed my tech skills. I could not afford an education beyond that.

My older brother was a sys admin, so I got good at that. Started my tech career in support and languished for a decade or so of low (progressively higher) paying tech jobs.

It wasn't until I knew developers in my personal life that I was able to identify exactly what I was missing to turn my programming hobby professional. I filled in all of those gaps over about 3 years of brutally hard work. I quit working and ran through my savings + some debt just to study and build a portfolio. It wasn't until I was in my 30s that I could change careers and do what I'd always wanted.

[jonbigbootay]

What, if you don’t mind, did you identify as your deficiencies? It could be interesting and instructive to others to know how you made it out...

[busterarm]

I would say understanding databases was the biggest gap. It was the thing was most easily fixed and produced the most payoff. Writing my own toy ORM as a learning tool was the thing that made all web frameworks more intuitive.

After that it was more about how to structure code and work with other peoples' code. I don't want to go as far as to say design patterns, but in my hobby days I would just start writing code and then have to do code gymnastics to work around the structure I built. Now I take much more time before I ever write anything to plan.

[busterarm]

Btw, I love the Buckaroo Banzai reference in your name