In one year I ventured through many sub-genres of electronic music, starting out with brostep, turning to old-school dubstep, then deep dubstep. Then I realized I liked drum and bass far more than dubstep and started a second project, aimed specially at more darker sounding dnb like darkstep and neurofunk. then, I noticed that my music was too "atmospheric" for drum and bass and ended up with my actual project of dark ambient/industrial ambient.
And I'm very fond of it, as I could finally be more "free" to experiment with different things. My audio manipulation skills have increased a lot during this time, as far as that I could manage to get a dark ambient song from the midi notes for "Garota de Ipanema", as requisited from a friend of mine.
So, basically I feel I've grown a lot during this last year as musician but the best of all is to be free of any "rules" that are out there.
Yes, I know that music is subjective and that there are no rules but: "your snare is over-compressed!", "your kick isn't hard enough for dubstep!", "your chorus doesn't have 64 bars!", "your intro is too long!".