[FearNotDaniel]

Absolutely. It was around 1983, I absolutely loved playing Pac-Man but as a twelve-year-old didn't have enough pocket money to keep feeding the arcade machines or to buy a games console. So I just kept hacking away at that ZX Spectrum until I had a playable version of my favourite game. I never studied CS, but around 20 years later in some random office job I discovered that Excel had some version of Basic built in, and again kept hacking away until I'd automated the most boring parts of my job. Eventually I taught myself the principles of actual software engineering instead of just flinging code together, with the help of some books and online courses, but it was always with a view to solving a specific business problem that was sitting in front of me at the time. I'm glad I learned this way, also approaching the process of software development itself as a real-world requirement rather than just theory; it makes it so much easier to recognize which patterns and techniques actually solve real problems versus those "best practices" which add unnecessary complexity when applied in the wrong context.