I am a programmer with 20 years of experience of professional software development having worked with 20+ programming languages. Yet I'm feeling more of a call to transcend the role of programmer to be more of a consultant/specialist/advocate/innovator regarding what I call "mapping the shadow realm".My proficiency is what I call component oriented development, which is essentially object oriented programming but where a single application may span any number of different servers and languages and platforms. My talent is understanding how the pieces of a system work (or don't work) together.My career has required that I do a little bit of everything from turning user requests to a feature that benefits a whole software community, to defining a spec, to implementing the application, to actually delivering a product. I have even assisted at presenting products;My career has also intersected a relatively interesting cross-section of industries including education, environmental/earth sciences, county and city governments, the military, environmental remediation firms, products related to laying fiber optic lines, Business Intelligence, and most prominently Geographic Information Systems (GIS). At some point I looked up from my keyboard and realized that from the perspective my career has provided that I could see the space between spaces, what should be a luminary network of information instantly pushing data to those who need it but instead is a barren bleak dark landscape; the shadow realm. And I've realized that of all the maps I've helped facilitate that maps of physical space are not nearly as needed as mappings between systems and the infrastructure required to terraform the shadow realm from what it is to what it should be.The notion of mapping the shadow realm like many of my ideas are way more epic that I have the talent to do alone. I'm therefore in the market to build a network of people I can work with and influence to affect a positive change.