I feel fortunate that my grandfather was a software engineer for the Air Force back when they were using punchcards. He liked to travel to visit each of his children and he had a bedroom in each home. Part of that bedroom furniture was a computer with a printer. This was back in 1983 when nobody really even thought of having a home computer due to the sheer cost of them at the time. It was so nice to eventually use WordStar to type up my notes for class instead of using a typewriter with carbon paper.
In college I wish I had taken courses for Computer Science instead of Information Technology - hindsight 20/20. I worked at Qualcomm in 1995 in Configuration Management trying to get software releases to the CDMA hardware that we had halfway across the world. Part of that job required me to maintain an internal web page for the rest of the company on how to access information. I learned HTML and was competent enough to keep that page going for years. I took refresher courses in 2001 and other than book learning or W3 Schools I just figured things out by looking at other web pages.
I left Configuration Management about ten years ago when I started working for Bend-La Pine Schools. There just are not enough manufacturing companies in Central Oregon and I no longer wish to travel to stay in the Configuration Management field. I primarily work in the student information system database but a percentage of my job is to maintain the frontend portion of the web page and provide training for our content managers. Our webpage is pretty old and the Bootstrap framework is pretty tight on what people are allowed to do so I have been cruising along with my existing html knowledge. My System Administrator is going to be moving our Concrete 5 CMS and Bootstrap framework to newer versions which will open up what I will be able to do. I might even be able to play with some CSS, which I currently am unable to do. Accessibility is the "thing" that I need to work on. That means brushing up on all of the things that make HTML5 awesome.
There are just so many things that web pages can do now and I feel like I need to start at the ground level again and work my way back up.
Since I am unable to play with CSS for our website, I have been looking at ways to use HTML to gain some visual and structural changes that will also make our site more accessible. Some of the other school sites that I look to for inspiration are Walla Walla School District, Springfield School District, and Long Beach School District. The last two also use the same student information system so I like to see how they present the information on it.