Thread by @ErrataRob

This.
First, find people of your same level to hang around with, that can explain things in your own terms (experts explaining things over your head really sucks).

Second, get a Raspberry Pi.

https://twitter.com/TinkerSec/status/1377602943038410755

Start "sysadmining" the Raspberry Pi. Find fun projects. At some point, start playing around with networking on it. Explore all the fun command-line tools, like 'traceroute'. Use 'openwrt' as your home router and "netadmin" that heck out of that.

Now install web services on your RPi and play around with that, watching how your web server can serve raw HTML containing CSS and JavaScript. Create your own website. Now buy a domain name and push out to an AWS server. Make a LAMP app that serves stuff from an SQL database.

Now hack your server with SQL injection. Keep playing with bad server-side scripts until you get good at SQL injection.

Play with Chrome "Developer Tools" to explore how websites construct their web pages.

Now it's time for JavaScript. Spend some time learning abstract programming language theory with JavaScript as well as practical fun with it both inside the browser ("Developer Tools" again) and on the command-line ("NodeJS").

Be like that this teen. No, he's not a "prodigy" as the story claims. It's all pretty straight forward -- if you are interested in it, and have people at your level who can help you over the bumps.

wusa9.com/article/news/h…

It's pretty darn frustrating when you hit that wall when none of it makes sense, and that simple explanation that are you reading is gibberish. That's because writers are bad and don't empathize with the questions you have.

Every insurmountably complex thing will eventually become easy, trust me. You just don't remember learning to tie your shoes and how hard that was. Or pooping. If you keep at it, in time, you too will badly explain easy topics as you forget all the problems you had learning them.

My best learning came not from mentors, but from people my own level. They, too, can suck, I still bitterly resent that 13 year explaining 'arrays' to me in a totally messed up manner when I was 12. But it's through talking about such things that we acquire knowledge.