Ok, I am 28 and I started coding at 8 (my father was a programmer) but I don't think I really spend more than 100 hours coding before 12, and 1500 by 18, in collage I may have added 2000 hours of real effort, but once I started working I have spent little time learning and more time jumping though hoops. I just started working with the J2EE / Spring / Hibernate world and within 200 hours of effort it seems fairly easy and it's mostly grunt work at this point in time.

So while I am still closing in on those 10,000 hours it's going to take a lot more stretching for me to get there. There was plenty of time I could have spent getting better, but I have written ASM, high and low level networking code, Multi-threaded Apps, desktop apps, code parsers, scientific number crunchers, websites, and mostly I just wonder why other people find it hard.

I don't think of my self as Fucking Awesome but I do think I am close to that point.