This talk is in fact not about being a home schooled individual, but rather about my jurney through the multiple steps of comming to terms and realizing the fact, that formal education is not a requirement set in stone, when wanting to work in the web development industry.
I will iterate through my process of persuing the educational path which I thought would be the only valid thing, allowing me to get a propper job as a web-developer.
Starting from a non-performant zombie-process hacking away at high-school education, later passing through an advertisment agency for a refreshing un-intentional reboot into a human equivalent of a multi-worker nginx daemon, I started realizing that I was on the right path. After a few work-load related crashes from imporper handling of requests, I learned how to handle and identify faulty or malicious requests and act accordingly.
Once I've entered the job market, the learning curves of new techonogies, proper handling of design patterns and the pressure of having to keep up-to-date with all of them - (As Jeffrey Way talked about last year), was what an education in the Computer Science field would have helped me with. But this was the least of my actual problems. The ability to estimate my work load and tasks, together with learning the ability to say "no", all while handling client communication and the situations that follow, is way beond the scope of a Computer Science bachelor.
The combination of being almost overly enthusiatic about learning, an early start with programming and having a good mentor which was open for almost every question I had, was what, in my mind, created a platform which exceeds almost any kind of educational program I know of.
I hope that this talk would help guide other individuals, that want to enter the web development industry, to ask themselves the right questions, knowing that almost no matter which path you choose, if you are determined with realistic goals and supporting peers, you will eventually reach your sliver lining.
Laravel and the community around it has been a key component in my learning experience, and therefore I would be insanely cool, too try out this first version of my first ever talk, together with the commuity which help me get to where I am today.