Blend's Director of Development Bob Davidson provides some guidance on how to do just that in this Coding with Bob video.
It's common for developers who are new to Episerver to learn on the job. Frequently they start out doing maintenance on existing projects. They cut their teeth on projects that have already been configured and architected. While this may ease the learning curve (and ensure new projects are set up to team standards), it can leave gaps in knowledge. A developer may learn about content modeling, scheduled jobs, views, and other items that require frequent updates and bugfixes, but might not receive much exposure to lower level concepts such as how content rendering works. The line between Episerver and MVC may be blurry. Much of the system may feel like voodoo.
I think it's useful to build at least one Episerver site from nothing, using (almost) no frameworks, going through each step manually and really understanding what's happening at each point. It's helpful to take the time to understand all of the black magic in the boilerplate code we seem to see in project after project.
To that end, I've started a video series walking through creating a new Episerver site from scratch. The first step, setting up a new, blank Episerver project is documented in the quick video below: