I start at Apple tomorrow - unfortunately I can't really say much about it except that my industry experience and experience interviewing with a myriad of companies helped prepare me for the interview process at Apple, although Apple is pretty intense as far as interviews go (I only study interview failures).

While I am self-taught and without a CS degree, I did spend 4 years at a top 15 PhD program in mathematics (UIUC), and have undergrad degrees in math & physics.

After leaving grad school, I was desperate for any career track job - after 2 years of fruitless job searching, I got fed up and started teaching self whatever skills I felt I needed. Observing lots of web developer positions open, I decided to target programming skills. Half a year after then, I got my first job as a frontend web developer. Turned out I loved the work, and invested a lot of hours outside of work investing in myself to improve my skills. I also was introduced to the world of open source, and guided to contribute. Fast forward to today, I have 4 1/2 years of web development experience, predominantly frontend but about two years working across the stack. I have architected frontends for most of my career, as well as done some major open source work.