Thank you for writing this. I can identify with many of the things you are saying, though my issues are tangental. I grew up truly in the country: "town" was 20 miles away. When it came to computing, I was always the smartest person I knew.

On the other hand, my father could do things in his line of work (industrial materials handling) that confound me to this day, despite his inability to learn to use a computer. Because of this, I always was able to maintain a realistic idea that having talent in the computing world didn't make me "smarter" or "better" than anyone else. This kept me from becoming an egotistical prick.

I also always knew that there were people out there who were much better programmers than I, because I used software I had no idea how to write. Thus, my biggest problem was that despite being the "big fish", I always knew that it was only because my pond was so small. When I finally got a 'net connection and started to find Pascal forums (my language of choice at the time), it was thrilling: here were people I could learn from!

Unfortunately, I haven't been lucky enough to have good mentors professionally, and when I moved on to Perl I had only limited access to the 'net and so didn't find the same community. I learned what I learned partially because I am a good learner: but finding PerlMonks has done more for me in the year or so I've been here than 3 previous years of using Perl to solve real-world problems.

I look at code I wrote 6 months ago, compared to what I wrote a week ago, and it's like that old code was written by a naive moron. So I start feeling pretty good about myself. Then I see someone like merlyn post solutions to SOPW that are so elegant that they border on art, and I am reminded how little it is I really know.

I don't think it gets said often enough: thank you to all the PerlMonks for helping me get where I am, and for driving me to become ever better!