Comment by rbits

It's presumably possible, but I feel like people might underestimate what's required. Mind you, I went to university so maybe I'm biased and don't fully understand, but I feel like the structure given by the university is very important.

If I wanted to learn JavaScript or .NET or CSS or whatever I could easily do so online. But that's different from becoming a software developer. The important thing is that university doesn't focus on one topic, it teaches a variety of topics that they think will be useful for your career. You can do this without uni, but you need to be good at figuring out what to learn, not just how. And of course the discipline to complete your goals by yourself, like you mention.

Although maybe something you could do would be to look at a university's course structure and copy it.