A 37-year-old wanting to learn computer science

Summary

Who am I? The title says it. I am a 37-year-old wanting to learn computer science. But who am I really? I am someone who has always wanted to build stuff. I am fascinated by the process of creating anything. And it gives me unbridled pure joy to have people use something I have built in a meaningful and useful way. I am not a complete beginner in computer science. I am still a somewhat-beginner. At least I know how to hack my way to build and host a minimalistic static blog like the one you are reading. I also just recently launched a slightly (only just so) more complex website for a passion project which my wife and I run [1]. I designed this website on my own as well while reading the book Refactoring UI [2]. This took me almost 4 months. The fact that I was able to build both these websites was also thanks to this beautiful framework [3] (and their well written tutorials and documentation) I accidentally discovered. So I also know how to read and understand (a lot of times) technical documentation. My career (so far) I have had a very non-linear career graph. I left (ran away from) home when I was 16. I was unable to take up the academic pressure of wanting to excel at school and in the competitive exams that follow it. Since then I have worked as a waiter, in an internet café, as a sales person, in a call center and in several other odd jobs. Most of my career though is spent as a teacher - teaching Math, Science and Computers to primary students. Most of the little I know about computers (majorly some bits of web-development) is self-taught. The plunge I feel the desire and the need to plunge to the depths of computer science. It is not a one or two-year plan, and it is not aimed towards landing a job as a software developer. I am okay with spending the next decade of my life trying to build some level of mastery in this domain. I know that the field is very vast and even a decade might be a small dip - but I really want to learn how to design APIs, build data...