I can, but it does mean starting from scratch.
I'm also particularly curious about the "no formal education in CS" bit - for various complicated reasons I haven't (yet?) completed basic HSC, and am wondering how to break into the industry in general. I'm not 100% sure where I want to start, but "simple Python scripts" sounds rather interesting. I assume there was a bit of being in the right place at the right time, but besides that, how did you get yourself noticed?
I got my job by getting noticed through my GitHub blog, to which I dedicated only about a half hour every other night for a month or so.
One night I got an article at the top spot of HN's front page. I had a great job offer within hours from a dev at a company which I've always respected.
Content on my blog was self taught, 99% of what I do at work is self taught. Formal CS education is still useful, but the ratio of cost/reward is terrible.
Very interesting, working for free is (for hilarious reasons) something I could probably pull off right now. I'm curious what kind of work this was - was it more generic coding or industry-specific? I've wanted to play around with graphics for some time, but "get a GPU and mess around with it" has repeatedly not worked out for me, so I've no industry experience.