Self-taught. I have a little discord server with some close friends and one of them is computer illiterate so I started working on a bot with a few commands to help him pirate some stuff and it's grown into thousands of lines of code and I'm constantly adding to it. Runs off a raspi and I'm getting close to my second rewrite.
I started another bot recently that runs an icecast radio station and the bot handles the commands for that, including managing a SQL database for the music library, downloading music and inserting into the DB.
The two bots are a little buggy but they run really well most of the time and most of my effort goes into fixing bugs here and there until I work up the motivation to rewrite them from scratch with all the knowledge I gained since the last rewrite.
Along with a ton of other little scripts and stuff.
I've done a single python class after the first rewrite. Harvard's CS50P (intro to programming with python).
That's the first class I've finished since I dropped out of high school and I learn better with a project I'm heavily invested in. It's been 3ish years since I started that first bot with very little programming background.
I'm now searching for a junior dev job while doing small database projects for a solar installation company.
This reminds me of when I realized that Rage Against The Machine was a heavily political band and their name had meaning. It was a weird moment but I went from liking them to absolutely loving them. Same thing with System of a Down lol.
I was a teenager, this guy is at least 50.