I started learning from a mentor who taught me everything I needed to. After about 3 years of full-time studying and working on personal projects, I got a job at Pennymac where I learned what it means to work on a big app with interconnected moving parts. But it was in my second job where I got to have much more agency over the fundamentals of a big app, and I got to work on all kinds of projects.
What makes me unique as a programmer is my love for optimization, simplification, automation, and efficiency, along with my experience working on component libraries and monorepos.