It's Eastern Europe, so those even marginally competent who haven't left are employed for peanuts in outsourcing centers, working on brain-numbing projects 9-5 or even 8-6. Ain't nobody got time for that.
I for example have started doing Django-based projects back in 2006, me and my other programmer co-worker were at the time I think the only Django programmers in our Eastern European country. We had also done some quite cool map mash-ups. But pretty soon after that people around us also started doing Ruby stuff, Plone/Zope (maybe not so cool, but interesting nonetheless), we had a local site that had done street photos the same as GStreetView 2 or 3 years before Google started covering our streets, some Information Retrieval/AI projects, it was not all a technological desert. And in recent years things have started becoming even more dynamic, but I have to admit I stopped paying that much attention to the local IT scene.
But, yeah, Eastern Europe (and Europe in general, with the possible exceptions of London, Berlin and maybe Dublin) will never get even close to the "feeling" one gets as a programmer in SV. In my mid- to late 20s I was pretty well aware of that I and was kind of let down, I was feeling that I was losing out by me not being in SV, but now, that I've grown a little older, I feel like I didn't lose that much by staying here.
That's exactly the thought that hits me every morning I wake up. That "feeling" that you're in the right place and in the right time to build some truly revolutionary technology. I hope that I start getting this feeling here, in Bulgaria, soon. Otherwise I'll have too many reasons to emigrate for a few years.
How many of the people in SV have that 'feeling' yet are completely wrong? Or... maybe a better question - how many actually build that 'truly revolutionary technology'?
There's a chance you'd get such a great 'feeling' every morning you wake up in SV, but there's more chance you can have an impact on the lives of people in your country by working with others and expanding the pool of opportunity right there.
You're in a position to help create a revolution in your geographic area, vs just sharecrop on someone else's revolution plantation.