I don't want to sound negative but "I code since I was a toddler" articles are one of the main reasons I've took a long time to work on proper coding skills.<p>Being from a poor family we didn't had access to any kind of computer while growing up. For some miraculous reason I still managed to secure a good career around system administration but my coding necessities never went beyond simple bash routines. Living on the field you read lots of these stories about how marvelous it was when the author as a child got his first computer and started coding basic. And I thought... "I'm in my 30s so I'll never be able to have the fraction of skill of that guys so why bother".<p>I was in my mid 30s when I needed something and just started doing it. It was good and it felt good. It wasn't that bad. Why did it took me so long to start? Because everyone who writes stories about coding has started since they were like 10 years old!<p>Sorry to rain my ramblings on your story. In the end I have no-one to blame but myself. The article was good and interesting.
I agree with the if-I-could-redo-this statement <i>I would tell myself to set aside time, at work even, to go deeper on the things that I didn’t know</i>.<p>Spending time to learn things usually pays off. In recent years, I've seen students try to solve problems by searching the web for "solutions". The result is often a cobbled-together mess, with unused variables and and the inclusion of a wide range of libraries to tackle problems that can be handled in the base language. I fear that very little is gained by this. Stackexchange and similar sites can be good tools for those with experience, but they are ruinous for students who are just starting out.<p>When in doubt, read the documentation.
My first serious project was kind of bulletin board system/internal e-mail written in Qbasic (when I was something like 10 years old). It was used by my siblings on our shared computer.<p>It stored data in CSV file and when someone entered "," in the message, it was broken and I needed to fix datafile manually. :-D