I gained confidence by making things. Whatever you think is cool is a great place to get traction—for me it was games. 3D accelerators had recently become GPUs, and I loved the idea of programmable shaders. I read the Direct3D 8 documentation cover to cover and I got into writing a little game engine, including shaders for the ATI card I had at the time. I never shipped a game, but that wasn't the point for me. It felt great to see that I could figure out some of the acknowledged hard parts of our field if I followed my interests and put in the time to study and play.