Hey! Thanks you so much for the kind words. Answering your questions...
My process of learning is basically to read as little as I can to have enought knowledge to get me started on building something. After that I just google the problems I find or read documentation to try to achieve what I need to do. It never worked for me to read a book and start working after that... I get bored and quit.
The site ended up looking really nice, of course the last thing I did was making it nice, at the beggining it was really ugly. I'm really bad at designing so I usually try to find sites that I like and "get inspired" with that... if you know codepen.io maybe you will find some resemble.
If you want to send PRs feel free!