Bravo indeed! I only started programming in my senior year of high school. I wanted to write an operating system for my senior project, but I thought that was WAY too ambitious. Kudos!
I forget where I read it but I remember a quote the basically boiled down to "The only people willing to attempt writing an OS are those too naive to know how much work it really is." Part of that probably explains why you can learn so much when just starting out...you just don't realize, yet, how much of you're life it will consume.
I realized over the years that it's those high school and college years where you can really expand your skill sets where as once the real world starts throwing things at you you start to stagnate. Makes me regret a lot of the time I wasted in those years.