Wendell Level Computer Skills

Hopefully Logan and / or Wendell can help. I was thoroughly impressed with the retina display desk lamp that you made and a lot of other hardware and software things the RTW community does. My question is how do you learn to rewire proprietary apple displays and dig through registry level components of software. There are a lot of really cool things shown and discussed and I would love to do some of that myself, I just don't know how. I'm looking for more than just 'google stuff.' To Wendell directly, did you learn a lot of the stuff you know from a computer science degree (I'm currently an engineering major but maybe a com sci minor...?) or forums on the internet, or just having different pieces of hardware to play around with? Thanks