I didn't really learn formally, but through play. I spent a few years wrenching on them at the start of my career, and I had a lot of free time in that job to try things. As part of my work, I ran and used the software to test it a lot, so I quickly got a feel for critical paths and then optimized around them. I borrowed a lot of ideas from other software that I've liked in my life. I kind of had a feel for what looked nice and naturally felt out industry practices around grid layouts, etc., and the result was something quite conventional. I also iterated and ended up improving my code when I learned about better ways of doing things.

I got an octopus of a custom control library out of it, for better or worse, lovingly handmade, not very architecturally clear and that was a thick layer of gold plating on an internal software product used by a handful of people for a medium-large size company that really had no interest or awareness in what our team was building.

So I guess I fall into that category of people who waste time on their first job making bad software but leave as better programmers.