A good portion of my experience and learning has been the result of being fascinated by something and learning whatever tools I needed to explore the topic. When I was a kid I just wanted to show pictures of my favorite LucasArts games so I taught myself HTML. In a highschool typing class, the only game on the computer was a BASIC game where monkeys threw bananas at each other and they exploded. Having little interest in the game itself, I found the source and discovered I could tweak variables to make the explosions fill the screen etc. A bit later in highschool I started teaching myself C++ and then decided to go to Oregon Tech where I got a BS in Software Engineering. There weren't any web courses, but I was always drawn to making pages so I read and fell in love with The Zen of CSS Design and started learning the ancient css styles... anyone remember sliding doors for borders? After college it was a bit of time at Garmin and then most my career making Qt guis for the EDA industry. In my freetime however, I was always teaching myself something new. When the iOS app store arrived, I learned Objective-C and app design to make a hexic clone. After that I spent time learning about AWS services to create an online paper telephone game. A bit later I got obsessed with Madden Ultimate Team and learned PHP so I could create a site that would scrape card data form the EA servers and graph the historic prices of cards etc. After that I got interested in fighting games where I learned a bit of arduino coding so I could solder precisely one bajillion wires onto an xbox controller circuit board so I could electrically read/write inputs to/from the controller to test input timing windows. Now I find myself interested in computer vision working in python and react to create a video processing pipeline to help develop and apply computer vision models to video.