I didn't mean to come across as condescending or discouraging. In regards to my tone: that is how I am in general. I've had an extremely difficult life and sometimes the warts of that shows. I simply accept that things are tough and at the end of the day you have to fight through it. When I read your post, you sounded like someone who was discouraged and at least I offered a little bit of advice that may help you, so I'm not totally heartless yet. Hell, I wrote a very long response to you and I am doing it again, so please take the information and curse my tone to your computer.

I took issue with the apparent blaming of the schools for age and sex discrimination because I don't believe that's what happened at all. I believe, more than anything, blaming on a situation without objective proof is irresponsible.

I really don't know why you didn't get in or how to get in because I do not run these schools. With this thought alone, you'd see why I would be remiss to give any concrete advice to get in aside from work at getting better every day.

I'm hoping to be somewhat more encouraging than I sound because I am a 34 year-old-male who ran my first piece of Python code about a year and a half ago. Regardless of my financial situation, I am not the least bit discouraged. At some point I know I will be good enough to convince someone to give me a chance at $$ and that is all I need. At the end of the day, I just love jamming out code, but I don't love it enough to be homeless in SF while I attend a school.

You have an impressive background and I admire you. I think it's great that you are building sites for other people. I just looked through your profile as well but I'll refrain from giving any reviews. This is not because I don't think the work is bad, it's because this is already too long for a forum post.

In regards to "setting the bar very hard for yourself:"

I really hope you pick of Land Of Lisp again because from what I've read of the sample chapters and of the reviews, that book is quite entertaining and impressive. Maybe I'm used to looking at Lisp and doing mathy puzzles with code, but I'm having a difficult time believing that book is harder than the SAAS class. I think more than anything, grinding your way through something that is very difficult for you is impressive.

I also think you should create a site (or some major multi-technology project) from scratch. I'm saying no frameworks, nothing that writes any code for you. Obviously, XAMPP is okay, but I'm saying just you, a blank page, and your computer. There is something truly visceral about working beneath the abstractions, and yeah... creating your own abstractions and building it all by yourself.

I don't know what to say to you or anyone in regards to "set the bar very high," but I'll tell you what I've done:

Work through SICP. Trust me, saying I did that book gets nods of approvals and raised eyebrows from everyone. This book is very difficult but I managed to do 75% of the problems in the book, and it is well worth the effort. I don't know how many times I found an answer to an exercise then looked up from my computer and just sat their dazed at the concepts they revealed. Yes, these concepts are hidden in the solutions, so if you decide to try it, reading it is simply not good enough.

After doing most of SICP, I still wasn't sure how much I had actually learned, and to be honest, I wasn't sure I learned anything "valuable" at all. I built a website in Clojure + PostgreSQL to test my knowledge and I was very pleased to see all that I had learned and figured out without ever being exposed to odd concepts, especially routing. It felt really good and this experience taught me that although SICP didn't feel "real world," I learned more from it that I could have ever imagined. This is why I take issue from anyone who says CS education is worthless.

Corman's Introduction to Algorithms is on my to do list and the book is in the mail as we speak. I want to do this book in C because it somehow feels fitting to learn about foundations while working in a foundation programming language.

I've learned how to do higher-level math like proofs and calculus and I'm currently working through linear algebra.

I'm also going to finally dive back into learning CSS and I am going to learn to do it responsive style. Very few people can do it, and I honestly believe this will be cake after the torture I put myself through already.