I've come to realize that in the world of real applications, the process is less about doing everything yourself and more about just Googling that shit until you find a solution.
Heck, look at all the questions on SO that keep cropping up. They all ask these simple problems that either they've faced or someone else has too. Some guy even wrote (about why he stopped using SO) that in order to answer the questions, he'd just google the question and find the answer in some blog post. Copy/Paste and make it pretty and you'll get 600 upvotes from the thousand other Rails noobs who need that answer.
That is why, if you want to build something real, just put all the pieces of the stuff together (like how people do in Rails) and launch the product.
Better yet, just do it with WordPress too, or some site builder. At the end of the day, if you're learning for the sake of learning, you'll give your 10 000 hours of duty, but who the heck wants to live behind a computer for 10 years?
Piecing shit together should be a philosophy that is encouraged, especially in elitist programmer world where if you mention anything of this sort (like this post) you immediately become an antagonist.