I lived in a small town in northern Canada until I was 17. I had had an interest in programming since I was 11, but the job most relevant to "computers" you could get up there was repairing them at BestBuy. My parents weren't particularly rich, and didn't encourage me to strive for high academics or anything of the sort; in fact, the only thing they really wanted me to do was to get a driver's license, so I could have a fallback job as a truck driver. I hadn't a single role-model for the "white-collar dream" I found myself pulled into from playing with Linux and reading Slashdot. I just knew I couldn't manage it living where I did.
At 17, I finished high-school and, with virtually no separation, moved to a more reasonably-large city (Vancouver) and began taking courses at a community college. I believed, at the time, that taking my first two years at a "cheaper" school would be good for my future student-loan-debt load, and optimized for this instead of, say, networking opportunities. The community college was full of unmotivated students just trying to squeak by, teachers who knew less about CS than I had learned from the Internet, and in the end, I didn't feel motivated enough† to make the grades to manage a transfer into the CS program of the "state" university (UBC.) My student loans cut off, and I dropped out.
I started attempting to do software-dev contracting. (It's very hard to get full-time employment as a developer without a Bachelor's, whether or not you're an autodidact with 8+ years' experience in some technologies.) I moved from one gig to another, never really finding that fabled "word of mouth" that would let me lever one contracting job into another. I always worked alone, and remotely; I was never hired onto a team. I looked on eLance a lot.
I still haven't made, in all this time (I'm 23 now), a single "programmer friend" who would qualify as a connection, nor met a programmer in person from whom I've learned a single fact, rule, or concept I wasn't already familiar with, or been introduced to any neat new technology. This isn't bragging about my talents--rather, just painting a picture of the bottom-of-the-barrel places I've been hanging out. I'm sure I would feel out-of-my-depth (in the best way) sitting in any arbitrary coffee shop in Silicon Valley‡, or in any even-somewhat-modern startup here or elsewhere.
If you want to talk about lacking connections, first imagine the closest thing to a "programmer" in your Facebook friends list being your friend from high-school who does accounting at an oil-and-gas firm. Imagine everyone in your family saying that the one time you got paid $50k was "a fluke and won't happen again; you should just work at a gas station like your mom and your aunt do" (leaving alone the fact that you don't have enough customer-service experience to be considered for that job in a competitive market.) Imagine having no major portfolio pieces you can show off, despite years of coding, because you've alternated between struggling to survive on a total dry-up of income with no savings (no time for side-projects), and doing programming jobs for capricious clients who take your backend system and give up on the idea before hiring a front-end guy, relegating your efforts to only be examinable through API calls and doodles of wireframes. (And while you're at it, imagine having a few friends in the US, who have perfectly good job opportunities available for you with their companies, but who can't help you out until you go back and finish school--which you can't, at least yet, afford to do.)
But there is that app I made two years ago that I still have in closed beta, the browser-based-collaboration-environment one with an active community even when I don't check in on it for weeks at a time. No time to remodel it into something good enough to launch to the public... but it lets me call myself a startup founder nevertheless. I'm just in stealth-mode, that's it. Heh.
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† Having undiagnosed ADHD may have had something to do with that as well. I imagine, having detected and compensated for that flaw, I would be quite better at slogging through that remedial-feeling workload if I had to do the same now.
‡ I'd love to move there, actually... if I had American citizenship. Or an undergraduate degree to legally qualify me for an H1B or TN work visa. Blocked on all fronts, there.
I waffled on whether or not to reply here, due to the personal nature of some of what I have to say, but here it is.
First; quit making excuses and having regrets. Either get off your ass and make it happen or be satisfied with not doing so. This is the only life you are going to get. It is short, and people in far worse situations have gotten further because they aren't afraid to try.
I grew up in total poverty, surrounded by poor uneducated friends and family, mostly who had defeatist attitudes that nothing better was possible for them. We were a family of poor white trash the whole time I was growing up. Everyone at school looked down on me and mine. Some of my immediate family, friends, cousins I grew up with are now addicts, thieves, pushers. Some of them are in rehab, some of them are dead; one in a shoot out with the cops. Most of the rest are working dead end jobs and drinking their way to early graves.
During my junior year in high school, my friend Mike looked at me and asked, "What are you going to do after high school?" I told him I was going to go to college, get a good job; and eventually maybe start my own business. Mike said, "That's a nice dream, but you're just going to end up hanging around here getting high and drinking yourself to death like the rest of us, because that's who we are. We're losers."
As a child I was beaten, stabbed, ate food out of dumpsters. On top of all of this I have terrible ongoing chronic medical illnesses and have had since I was a very small child. I can say, emphatically, my situation was worse than yours.
Now I have been writing software for 15 years, and I am not the best, but I'm damn good at what I do. I make enough money; I live a good life. I have connections. None of this was given to me. I worked and sweated, I gave, and I took back. And when everyone said, "You can't."; I said, "I will."
The connection I needed to found my software company (not a big company, but it's provided for me (and now my family) for 14 years) came from e-mailing with the author of a hybrid math / programming book about bugs in his published code.
And in the last five years I started working on the Perl 6 project in my spare time. I've made at least a dozen connections in the Perl community that way, and getting started with it didn't involve anything more than getting on the IRC channel and participating. That also found me a group of peers who have a lot to teach me about programming. Not to mention I get the chance to discuss language design and implementation issues with Larry Wall on a regular basis.
What I'm trying to say is the Internet and open source software make it easier to make connections with people doing interesting work than it has ever been in the history of mankind. If you're just looking to make connections in the physical area around where you live, you're really missing out.
Connections don't have to be people you meet & interact with physically. Many of the people I work with I've either never met, or only meet every couple of years on an international flight to the other side of the world.
Try reaching out to people on HN, email them with a specific question about how they achieved something that you're interested in & that they've done. I've been trying some of that recently and had a ridiculously high response rate (100% so far.) It might not turn into a "connection", but you'll probably learn something in the meantime. Expect that maybe only 1 out of 100 people you contact will actually turn into a "connection".
Being in that position is not unusual at the young age of 23. I'd suggest looking for a full-time position first, getting some experience under your belt, then trying the contracting thing.
Vancouver has quite a few talented engineers but the teams can be a bit insular. The meetups are good and you should definitely go to either the Ruby on Rails one, or Node Brigade. CascadiaJS is happening soon too.
If you want to get some introductions I'd be happy to grab a coffee.
If you are set up to take an occasional trip south, Vancouver is not far from Seattle or Bellingham, both of which have active developer communities. (I live in Bellingham).
I lived in a small town in northern Canada until I was 17. I had had an interest in programming since I was 11, but the job most relevant to "computers" you could get up there was repairing them at BestBuy. My parents weren't particularly rich, and didn't encourage me to strive for high academics or anything of the sort; in fact, the only thing they really wanted me to do was to get a driver's license, so I could have a fallback job as a truck driver. I hadn't a single role-model for the "white-collar dream" I found myself pulled into from playing with Linux and reading Slashdot. I just knew I couldn't manage it living where I did.
At 17, I finished high-school and, with virtually no separation, moved to a more reasonably-large city (Vancouver) and began taking courses at a community college. I believed, at the time, that taking my first two years at a "cheaper" school would be good for my future student-loan-debt load, and optimized for this instead of, say, networking opportunities. The community college was full of unmotivated students just trying to squeak by, teachers who knew less about CS than I had learned from the Internet, and in the end, I didn't feel motivated enough† to make the grades to manage a transfer into the CS program of the "state" university (UBC.) My student loans cut off, and I dropped out.
I started attempting to do software-dev contracting. (It's very hard to get full-time employment as a developer without a Bachelor's, whether or not you're an autodidact with 8+ years' experience in some technologies.) I moved from one gig to another, never really finding that fabled "word of mouth" that would let me lever one contracting job into another. I always worked alone, and remotely; I was never hired onto a team. I looked on eLance a lot.
I still haven't made, in all this time (I'm 23 now), a single "programmer friend" who would qualify as a connection, nor met a programmer in person from whom I've learned a single fact, rule, or concept I wasn't already familiar with, or been introduced to any neat new technology. This isn't bragging about my talents--rather, just painting a picture of the bottom-of-the-barrel places I've been hanging out. I'm sure I would feel out-of-my-depth (in the best way) sitting in any arbitrary coffee shop in Silicon Valley‡, or in any even-somewhat-modern startup here or elsewhere.
If you want to talk about lacking connections, first imagine the closest thing to a "programmer" in your Facebook friends list being your friend from high-school who does accounting at an oil-and-gas firm. Imagine everyone in your family saying that the one time you got paid $50k was "a fluke and won't happen again; you should just work at a gas station like your mom and your aunt do" (leaving alone the fact that you don't have enough customer-service experience to be considered for that job in a competitive market.) Imagine having no major portfolio pieces you can show off, despite years of coding, because you've alternated between struggling to survive on a total dry-up of income with no savings (no time for side-projects), and doing programming jobs for capricious clients who take your backend system and give up on the idea before hiring a front-end guy, relegating your efforts to only be examinable through API calls and doodles of wireframes. (And while you're at it, imagine having a few friends in the US, who have perfectly good job opportunities available for you with their companies, but who can't help you out until you go back and finish school--which you can't, at least yet, afford to do.)
But there is that app I made two years ago that I still have in closed beta, the browser-based-collaboration-environment one with an active community even when I don't check in on it for weeks at a time. No time to remodel it into something good enough to launch to the public... but it lets me call myself a startup founder nevertheless. I'm just in stealth-mode, that's it. Heh.
---
† Having undiagnosed ADHD may have had something to do with that as well. I imagine, having detected and compensated for that flaw, I would be quite better at slogging through that remedial-feeling workload if I had to do the same now.
‡ I'd love to move there, actually... if I had American citizenship. Or an undergraduate degree to legally qualify me for an H1B or TN work visa. Blocked on all fronts, there.