It's not about being self taught, its about the phenomena of dabbling around a conceptual component in aOS/Runtime/Framework/Language that you aren't quite ready to commit to fully understanding and you just want to know enough to get something done. Quite often, this is a pragmatic choice, but if the thing you are dealing with is a central part of your system, then this becomes untenable long term. Unfortunately this is actually semi common and some very strange software gets written because things weren't properly understood. This article is the authors commitment to learn one of these concepts.