I did the same thing; never finished Grade 10. Had been playing with coding since I was 5 [1]. Always knew one day I'd "do something with computers". My dad wro

I did the same thing; never finished Grade 10. Had been playing with coding since I was 5 [1]. Always knew one day I'd "do something with computers". My dad wrote one of the first books on the Internet in '92 so I got some good exposure somewhat early. Moved to a third world country at 15 cause they didn't card for booze. Ended up with some web site contracts, and kept diving deeper until I was a "real" programmer (not just web/CRUD stuff - but high perf, high-scale, life-critical, reversing, etc.). It was only hard for the first little bit. No one takes a 17-yr-old seriously. But I had a 24-yr-old business partner and that helped. I managed to get a speaking slot at a 300+ person business conference and picked up some solid clients that built portfolio. Plus it was 2000, so a whiz-kid-Internet-thing had some sort of cachet perhaps. I already had a real career and some recognition by the time I would have graduated, so, eh, it worked out and was fun. Though I do regret not knowing maths and not having taken really solid algorithms classes (OTOH, no guarantee I'd have gone to a real school - might have gotten fake CS classes like so many end up with). And I wonder what kind of connections I might have made if I had stayed with it, especially staying in the US. 1: Most elaborate thing was designing a fake grade tracking program (demo) to convince other kids I had hacked the school's systems (hint: they used paper) and could change their grades.