I started developing in PHP around 2004 when I built my own ecommerce website in it to sell personalised poetry. I came from Novice, to expert in PHP, learning all it takes to make you an advanced PHP developer, object-oriented programming, namespacing, API connections, best security practices, testing, and during all this I also fell in love with WordPress.
Since I built my first custom theme for a client I was hooked. Now I am a well known top quality WordPress and WooCommerce developer. According to Stack Overflow I am one of the top 5% of PHP developers and top 5% of WordPress developers as well as being the top 10% of Javascript devs. I think that says it all but if not check out my plugins in the WP Repo (https://profiles.wordpress.org/webby-scots#content-plugins) or in Git (https://github.com/LiamBailey).