Blog of a Disabled Coder

Blog of a Disabled Coder

From Hacker to Nobody and Back

I don’t feel good about myself as a disabled man unless I am productive. You see I was born with cataracts and would have been blind if a super rare surgery wasn’t performed early in life. Now as a result I have low vision, which is better than nothing. This means I can read enough to write this blog, to code in the terminal, but I read slower than most because I have only one somewhat working eye. I guess the other one is for symmetry. I can still see through both eyes, but you get the point. I can’t drive a car, I can’t take the bus to a random job interview alone, I can’t travel alone, I can’t do most of what the rest with good eyes can do. But I was able to code as a teenager.

I used to code in about twenty languages in the ‘90s. Back then there were no YouTube tutorials, and there was not a single book at the library about C or Turbo Pascal which I loved very much. And assembly graphics routines? Forget about it. There was no Amazon either! These things didn’t exist. Back then, coders were people who finished university courses. Oh how it all has changed. I mastered a lot by myself, I used Windows, Linux, and OS/2, all except for Mac. I even wrote music, made 3D movies in Truespace before Microsoft killed it, and mastered Photoshop deep fakes to amuse my friends before memes were a cool thing that kids exchanged! I was the master of computers and everyone had questions for me and I was in high demand.

So much so that I pursued a job in tech, first with Sprint, then Patriot Computer, and then the mighty UUNET which later became Worldcom and then Verizon Business. I mastered PHP, CGI-bin, Perl, shell scripting, Linux administration, e-commerce website building, ReXX scripting, TCP/IP, Cisco and Juniper backbone routing, BGP4, and MPLS even. I was at the CCIE level of networking working with some of the best and brightest in Toronto and was even the emergency network on-call for the Canadian backbone for years.

Then my father died, life went to the dumpster and I gave it all up. Spent a few years living back home in Serbia, but did not touch programming or networking for years and years. I spent a few years playing soccer with little children and then came back to Canada. Spent a few years learning Kung Fu, became a Kung Fu instructor at Toronto’s Shaolin Temple, then played soccer for three years every day for hours at U of T’s back campus for fun. I was exploring everything the world had to offer to a disabled man. Through it all, I kept my hobby of writing music and even released a small album on Spotify. It isn’t a done album in terms of production. I released it as a backup so I have someplace to listen to my music when I’m outdoors.

Now I am getting back into coding and I will document my journey on this blog. This year, 2023, I am learning Java which I always wanted to master. I want to write my own version of Pac-Man which I will call Jacman. But with different graphics than the original yellow dude eating pellets. One of my other goals that I am learning a lot about is mastering the 6502 assembly so that I can write a game for the Commodore 128. Both of these projects will take me all year. In the background, I will write music every day releasing it on YouTube each day in 1-hour videos of my practice in Reason, a music program. I am not sure if anyone cares what a disabled man is doing in terms of coding, but I will document my journey regardless. Maybe it will help some people, maybe not. I am not an expert at teaching others how to do things so there are better ways to learn. Yet this will give me an interesting thing to do with my code and it makes me happy to write daily. All in all, I am thankful that hashnode is free and that I am allowed to express myself even though I am disabled, at least in this place. I feel somewhat included and accepted even though I know that hashnode is a business and that nothing is truly free. I hope it will be fun having this blog.