well, having a younger brother who knew how to code helped. also, in my previous life, i was a product manager developing web products for an investment bank. so i had some experience with design and knew how stuff worked. just never actually coded anything before. so i took an intensive web dev course to build a foundation and have been learning on my own since.

i found that, with so many references and tutorials online, once you have an idea of what you want to build, its just a matter of writing (more often borrowing) some code and tweaking it till the frickin thing works.

it's definitely been frustrating at times. but the payoff - the satisfaction i feel when i solve a problem or make the site behave exactly how i want it to - it's been well worth the effort.