Right. I'm as great an example as any (and so egoless, to boot!). I grew up in bumfuck nowhere, suburban Maryland. Our "town's" (if you can even call it that) m

Right. I'm as great an example as any (and so egoless, to boot!). I grew up in bumfuck nowhere, suburban Maryland. Our "town's" (if you can even call it that) main draw was… a shopping mall. We had an IKEA! OMG! I never went to any fancy or esteemed college and, heck, I dropped out of high school. And part of the reason I had the guts to do that was because I knew people then who went on to be people like Jason Snell, editor of MacUser. I knew him when he was a Mac repair guy. I knew Landon Fuller, who's pretty big in the OSS world, and he was my age and dropped out of HS and did great. I knew the executive (technical) assistant to the CEO of Cisco at the time (another HS dropout) and… lots of other people. How? IRC. A platform open to all. Then later, I wrote a Mac web site, and met all the Mac writer/publisher types. I wrote about wanting to grow up to be the female David Pogue and David Pogue commented on my blog post. And on and on, and here I am today. I did the exact same thing in each "world" I moved through -- design (YayHooray, et al), code (PHP, then Ruby, then JS) -- meeting people in the community online, taking an interest in them, being around them, and writing and sharing what I learned. That's how I made most of my friends and met my husband. That's how I got jobs and speaking gigs. Et voila. Didn't matter that I started in my mom's basement in Zerosville and literally was the most computer-savvy and entrepreneurial kid in a 5 mile radius.