[nknighthb]

After 1000 hours with Google, all of those things are completely plausible. Moreso if you have a mentor to turn to. In fact, I would think that if you haven't reached that level of basic competence after 1000 hours, you're probably a pretty slow learner, or just not getting programming.

I was maybe 40-80 hours into finally putting serious effort into programming when I started playing with hand-crafted ELF binaries and trying to beat GCC at optimizing simple routines (never had any real trouble with pointers again after that; assembly makes it all make sense). Hoverover effects are not the sort of thing I would have been struggling with.

Incidentally, she's probably spent many more hours coding in the last six months than I have in the past year, and it's nominally my full-time job. It's amazing how little actual code you can end up writing as a professional software engineer.