It's 2018. It's been 60 years since the memex and the mother of all demos. The ideas in computers aren't new or revolutionary, we know a wheel is round. The next stage is making a wheel that works better.
That might work well for your crud day job, but for your own projects, why not learn from the mistakes of others and not your own? It's much simpler to read why you should do something than figuring out all the ways you shouldn't.
>get to the point where you can write some idiomatic code
What does this even mean? I know C back to front and there is no such thing as idiomatic C. You write one type of C for embedded, one for batch numeric, one for systems, one for real time all are "idiomatic" and all have next to nothing to do with each other. It's even worse in higher level languages.