This blog and it's meaning

Language seems to be an inadequate tool when I try to describe with words the whys and the reasoning behind the way I feel. I have tried multiple times in the past by writing a journal, then starting up blogs were my multiple dimensional
thoughts had to fit in two dimensions. This is yet another attempt at putting down on paper, digitally speaking, what and who I really am, and to try to make sense of myself.

The title of this blog is almost a happy coincidence: The Lone Star Developer. I do happen to live in a small town in South Texas and I happen to be a software developer by trade. But I also feel lonely in the sense that I don't fit in. I was born and raised in a big city with its sounds, its lights and all sorts of different and interesting people. I used to go to Djambe Jams and go rock climbing regularly. While going through college, learning my trade, there was no thought in my mind that I would one day develop shrink wrap software for the coolest corporation. By the time I got my diploma, I said pew! to corporations and decided I wanted to work for cool companies like Pixar. 

It didn't turn out that way.

Instead, I met and married a wonderful person and after a while decided to move to South Texas, near Corpus Christi, the biggest city in the region. I found a job as an in-house developer, maintaining web pages on our company's Intranet, which helps our employees manufacture pumps and valves for the oil fields. We are a paperless company, which means that every one of our business systems has to be programmed and put on the Intranet by us. There is always something to do, and that's good. 

I guess some people at Pixar build web pages, but I sure didn't envision such a future for myself! Imagine, I was dreaming of a job in a big city in California working for the coolest company in the world and instead I landed in South Texas, working for a pump and valve manufacturer. This, my friends, is a culture shock.

So no, I don't fit in and I want to address the disadvantages and challenges of my situation: no mentors, low amount of cultural events, dealing with old technology and a infinitely small peer community. How can I develop my skills and keep myself challenged enough to keep growing? So far, I have reached the "good enough" stage in my professional life and it is not where I want to stall. I want to program using Bayesian filters instead of if statements but the level of knowledge that I need in order to do that seems exponentially difficult to reach.

From Joel Spolsky, on his popular blog: "A very senior Microsoft developer who moved to Google told me that Google works and thinks at a higher level of abstraction than Microsoft.

Google uses Bayesian filtering the way Microsoft uses the statement," he said. That's true. Google also uses full-text-search-of-the-entire-Internet the way Microsoft uses little tables that list what error IDs correspond to which help text. Look at how Google does spell checking: it's not based on dictionaries; it's based on word usage statistics of the entire Internet, which is why Google knows how to correct my name, misspelled, and Microsoft Word doesn't.

I decided recently to be pro-active and to take my future into my own hands. This blog is my way of reaching out and to talk about things that are important to me. I will explore subjects I'd like to master and post them here for everyone to see and comment on. Hopefully, by connecting to the world and exposing myself this way, the world will connect back to me and make me feel like I'm not in a small town anymore.