It's true I had used bulletin boards before, but I hadn't done much programming before that outside of a high school classroom.

In any case, I could pose a litany of other examples where I started in a subject precisely by "resolving" some common problems. For instance, when starting with machine learning, I implemented a simple naive Bayes text classifier myself. It was fun and illuminating.

Yes, this is definitely a learning style. Yes, people's tastes differ. But, I think that's my point...