First of all, welcome here!

(14-08-2016, 06:20 PM)citrus Wrote: I guess what I'm really asking is if you have any advice to share, something you learned on the way and in retrospect you wish you new sooner rather than later - something like that.

Pick up a project, and work on it, either by adding features, refactoring or simply rewriting it from scratch!
I felt like I wrote my first "real" project when I picked an existing library that's not a standard one, and wrote a program to use it.
The first one was [wendy](http://git.z3bra.org/wendy/log.html), then [prout](http://git.z3bra.org/prout/log.html), and [so on](http://git.z3bra.org).

Just force yourself to code, and do it quickly!