[krolley]

If I am looking for a surgeon for an operation, it's enough for me to know that he was trained at a good school and has enough experience -- for that a bio online is already decent. I trust his education, after all the field of medicine is one of the oldest in existence.

There is no such trust in the education of software developers, perhaps because software development is such a new field. I've worked with great ones without a formal education and terrible ones that graduated from good schools. The way to 'prove' yourself to someone when they can't work with you (e.g. first stages of a hiring process) is to demonstrate your work by using technical articles, GitHub commits etc. Also, that stuff is not specific to web devs, I'm sure you can find every kind of project under the sun on GitHub.