Yes. In the 80s I was a little over half your age. A local library gave me a pile of old Byte and Compute magazines. I had been checking out the latest regularly for months. Every one.

What taught me was debugging and good examples of compact form and function. There were no IDEs (for me) and I didn’t have the ability to write out from ROM BASIC for years.

I remember those years!

I went on to intuitively automate batch production systems and develop enterprise this and that, without any formal education (I was usually the most eager and practical at every turn.)