I learned coding the best way: While getting paid. I was an Excel junkie (still consider myself as one) and a colleague taught me PHP. This gave me the skills to apply for real programming jobs. Eventually I was hired at a company as a PHP developer who would need to be flexible enough to transition into a C# developer within the next 6 months. It wasn't easy, but after about 8 months and a 1-week course later I was programming in C# .NET with grace. Not looking back at PHP now at all. Naturally, today I can apply for a whole bunch of different jobs that I definitely could not three years ago.

I have the dearth of good programmers to thank for this of course and I am grateful every moment when I understand how lucky I've been.