Devving in Isolation

Hi people, I'm new around these parts and settling in.

I've been programming for about 3 1/2 years now and had been making decent progress, but recently that's slowed. I've been working for a company who employs only one other developer, this being a contractor who I rarely meet. As it may be becoming clear I have very limited methods of furthering my own coding concepts as well as feeling hollow having little opportunity to feed back into the community.

It'd be great to hear ways some of you have dealt with this form of isolation, obviously, sites like this are great for knowledge pooling & networking but any other tricks of the trade would be so useful to me right now!

Again, it's great to meet you all and scanning the discussions I can tell this will be slick virtual community to be a part of.