I don't know if it's possible to get a good answer to this but: if you learned how to make websites with, like, users who can login and do things where the website stores stuff in a database, without doing it as a job, how did you do it?

I feel like in principle I know all of the basic pieces (HTTP, HTML, CSS, SQL, CORS, various programming languages, etc), but also somehow it still feels extremely hard to me

(no more replies please there are enough)

@b0rk IIRC I wanted to use the Slashdot software but couldn't afford Perl hosting. This was around 1999-2000 so simple things like WordPress didn't exist yet. Mostly trial and error, to scratch a personal itch.
@b0rk honestly I think most of my best learning comes from itch scratching, whether for work or not