Funny feelings in my tummy reading this! I worked with winapi back in late 2000s to early 2010s and I remember having some great fun with it. Although there was MFC and WPF I didn't want to learn them because I wanted the fastest & leanest (catch the reference :) executable I could get; I'd then run gnu strip over the .exe too.

Stack Overflow was essential to figure out arcane flags that could solve my issues (when even MSDN, another great site with its examples, couldn't) and Raymond was very present in SO at that time, iirc he replied to one of my questions too. That's when I found his blog, always great reads!

Now I've been a 14-year Linux user and none of the toolkits and libraries give anything close to the winapi experience.