You're right, of course. I would never list any of these skills on my resume, or tell any interviewer that I could do them. I would never try to get a freelance contract that requires these skills. They're completely self-taught, completely untested, and I have zero confidence that I really "know" any of them. When I said I have no proof—I meant I have no proof for myself, either, as an empiricist.

Really, what it amounts to is that when I come home, I spend twelve hours (that is, 4PM-4AM) "studying": reading programming books, testing out bits of code, writing scripts and hanging out in places like /r/coding and LtU. It's basically my sole hobby, and I started when I was 11 (with a website run on a scrounged Pentium Pro off a Slackware LAMP stack.) I'v continued teaching myself various skills since then, never producing useful output, just reading and testing myself. I don't have confidence that my skills are anything more than a bunch of academic knowledge.

If I recall, these are the most code I've ever actually written:

* Stargazer, an interactive galaxy creation program in SDL/Ruby (you plot and name stars, create flight/jump/trade paths, and classify arbitrary three-dimensional regions with arbitrary metadata; it's for sci-fi writers.)

* Persona, a webapp where you create a user, that user creates several fictional characters (personas), and then, as a specific character, you answer questions out of a user-generated pool in order to flesh out your individual character. It's sort of like OKCupid in reverse—you specify the "factors" your graph of characters should display in advance (love, hate, admiration, apathy, etc.) and then the service helps you answer questions in a way that will conform to those pre-ordained relationships.

* Nameclasser, a Bayesian classifier trained on the details of individual words (sound, length, derivation, etc.) You feed it a dictionary; it spits back a subset of it usable as "interesting" character names.

* Folio, a mark-up language (and reference parser) similar to markdown, but intended for fiction (distinguishes pages, has footnotes, does neat things when it recognizes sections of screenplay-like dialogue, etc.)

* Christmas, a graph adventure (it's a text adventure, but with the interface being clickable words in bubbles—basically an ever-expanding tree of circle-menus.) It's two-player, networked: the client(s) are in C with Lua extensions, server in Clojure. It also features something I've never seen before: network-transparent undo. (Only works under certain world-model-specific conditions, of course.)

* SMS Importer, a little tool to sanitize a copy of your SMS database, copied from your iPhone's backup folder (SMS data has always been stored in 3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28.mddata, if you're curious), and present it as a folder of formatted-text chat logs. (It also keeps its own gateway database, just merging in previously-unseen texts, so you can delete an SMS record on your iPhone—it makes it a might bit faster—and still keep the record after re-importing.)

* An unnamed, unfinished project involving editing timelines of narratives and meta-narratives in time-travel stories.

* Nodepad, a hierarchical outliner (where every "node" was a folder+rtf file underneath, so you could make any node the working root), and Sponge, a visual to-do list (all the tags were importable 16x16 icons), both in C#.

* Wikirei, a wiki designed from the top-down to look as clean, presentable, and non-wiki-ish as possible when you don't have editing rights, and elegantly expose editing features when you do.

And each and every one of those is crap, in my opinion, and I would never release any of them. ...Having said that, and looking at that list, my problem might more be anxiety at releasing my work, than actually producing it. I've been working in a silo for so long, with no feedback as to whether my code has any quality (except what books say) that I have no idea what others will say when they see mine.