You're basically me when I started programming seriously at ~25. Get at fast as you can to a point where you can mingle with other programmers to talk and have

You're basically me when I started programming seriously at ~25. Get at fast as you can to a point where you can mingle with other programmers to talk and have your skills assessed by others and also get as fast as possible to do client work, even if you do bad work and screw some clients at first (you can start feelancing with sysadmining, then web-programming then whatever you're good at and you like...). Now to be fair, I learned some C++ in high school (nothing beyond algorithms and solving math problems by coding though), and I think I learned HTML in 7th grade and also touched Javascript in high school, so I had a "base start", but then went on to a whole different field and turned back to coding about 8 years later. EDIT+: And there's no reason you won't create the "next Facebook or Twitter", at pre-scaling stage they were both very simple technically speaking, what one could learn in a couple years starting from absolute zero, no need for Stanford level CS knowledge here... if you have a great idea (99.9...% of people don't, even if they think they do!) you can turn it into a prototype and then turning the prototype into a real business can be more about business skills not coding skills, because an interesting idea that brings profit will always be scalable because you will be able to hire smart people to scale it for you. And at the end of the "day" it will be your choice whether you'll decide to play on the business side or coding side more.