Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?

I'm sipping a decent morning coffee, I'm in Japan, whereas my home is San Francisco. I've been here for ~5 weeks, trying to escape the coronavirus disaster that is unfolding in the US, and trying to enjoy spring in Japan as well. I'm lucky enough to be able to afford a few weeks abroad without too many money worries.

Work is a disaster. The last ~4 years of my life have been both unlucky (e.g. recently I was offered a highly lucrative executive job in SF, only to see the CEO change his mind on the whole operation - not on me specifically - at the last moment) and badly handled by me.

My professional career essentially came to a halt and so far didn't recover. I still keep my cool, but I am a bit worried about what's going to happen in the future, especially given the current situation with the virus.

And now, in all of this, few minutes ago I've read "I'm going blind, how to prepare", and my perspective suddenly changed. It's as if something clicked, and I can now "see" the world as it is.

I'm incredibly lucky. Most of us here are incredibly lucky. Zach, you probably didn't mean it, but today you somehow triggered a very positive reaction in me. I wanted to let you know.

I also wish you best of luck with your condition, and hope that you will manage to have a great life despite a deteriorating health.

Some approaches to consider: Algo trading , creating and selling off products, creating stuff for startups for a stake in the profits. Right now, you may want to consider all options rather than regretting not doing so later.

I have seen two blind persons in my work life: one is a guru with emacs and gnome programming and today runs his own Python training and also sells an accounting package ( called GNU Khata). He was born blind.

Another is an architect and advisor at a consulting company. He lost his vision to an accident. He was fortunate to have already built up capital, and used that as a buffer to take a year off to learn how to cope and to continue.

Until I’d met them both, I’d thought that suicide might be the only feasible approach were I to go blind. I am now completely positive about living even after blindness, but I do understand the benefits of having a capital base and being financially independent.

All the best.

1. Emacs and Emacsspeak in particular. Emacs is the richest text-based user experience out there; imagine if all Terminal apps were configurable and scriptable under the same coherent framework. This is why Emacsspeak is an incredibly valuable asset that I would lean heavily on in the event of vision loss.

2. I would invest heavily in making sure that I have a very trivial way to deploy Chrome user extensions or similar such that I could write my own screen readers, document explorers, etc. tailored to my own liking. The only thing close to Emacs is the DOM with JavaScript as it’s Elisp. A lot of people gripe about the web, but the fact that almost all my apps come under the same pliable DOM means I can manipulate without vision almost everything. See e.g. vimperator.

These two things mean that you could do most of your job as-is, with assistance from colleagues.

As you’re a full stack developer, you’ll find point 2 easy. And point 1 is hard but a worthy investment. Emacs is older than the web and will probably outlive it.

I would probably also look at using tree sitter to make screenreading code more efficient at the AST level, because code is parsed linearly but we read it with random access.

I’d start working with my screen turned off or covered with paper if I knew ahead of time, that way I could start training. Honestly, computing-wise I wouldn’t be that worried about losing my vision. It’s the rest of life that’s harder.

Best of luck to you! Drop me a PM if you’d like some pointers on my two bullet points.