371–380 of 497 posts
You can definitely continue as a software engineer. I'm living proof. It won't be easy, especially at first. For a while it will feel like you're working twice as hard just to keep up with your sighted peers. But eventually, the better you get with your tools, you'll find you have some superpowers over your sighted peers. For example, as you get better with a screen reader, you'll be bumping the speech rate up to 1.7…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A while back I worked for a team that had wired up Jenkins to a speaker in the office. Each type of event would trigger a different Zelda sound effect. Victory music for successful deployments, game over music for breaking the build, etc. Notably, dev server exceptions were connected to sword clashing sounds. It led to debugging situations like this: "Okay, so that's two clanks when we click on this button, but if we…
I used to debug embedded systems by hooking an I/O pin to the speaker, then would toggle the pin level at various points in the program. You could tell where it went wrong by the "song" after a while. Sorta like tuning your car by ear.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any modestly "modern" elevator would have Braille indicators. And many also announce floors same way public transit does.
I've never been in an elevator that announced the floors with anything better than a ping. This is despite elevators being controlled by single board computers since around 1980. The buttons have had braille on them for a long time.
Now, before I am tarred and feathered alive by pretty much everyone here in the HN community, please give me a moment to explain!
You see, most people spend their lives, their entire lives, searching for something which is outside of themselves, something which they believe will make them happy.
If they find it, it very well might, but unfortunately, it's only for relatively short periods of time, and then desire kicks in, and then there's a new set of goals, a new set of priorities. Nothing lasts forever. Nothing that grants happiness, even for many years -- will continue to do that for many more. Everything changes. (This is Buddhist philosophy incidentally).
What you're searching for, might very well be within -- rather than in the external world.
So how do you find this thing within?
Well, the first step is that you have to close down the external world.
You do this by closing your eyes (note that this is no different than blindness -- but it is less permanent), and relaxing, observing the mind and its flow of images.
If you see nothing but black... don't worry, I promise you, there's a ton of stuff in there -- more than you could ever imagine, more than 80 Zillion Internets' worth of data.
You'll see black for a fairly long time, maybe it will be months, maybe it will even be years, but eventually (with continued regular meditation) is that you'll start to see pinpricks of light, bits of sound, and you'll start to get intuitions and ideas from the higher mind, and you might see flashes of images. You might also drift off into lucid or semi-lucid dreams.
The trick is, don't try to use any force whatsoever to try do any of that, or those things will disappear. The harder you try, the less success you'll have (it's paradoxic in this respect), so a relaxed gentle focus is the key.
Becoming blind, at least the knowledge that that's going to happen to you -- could be compared to knowing that one day in the future you're going to be pushed into the ocean -- and you don't know how to swim.
Meditation, closing the eyes for at least 20 minutes a day, at a regular time every day, and relaxing, letting go, but maintaining a teensy bit of relaxed, gentle focus, gentle presence ("be here, now"), is not unlike learning to swim.
By the time you are pushed into the ocean... you want to be a champion swimmer, not someone who doesn't know how to swim.
Meditation then, is like learning how to swim, if the knowledge of future blindness is like being forced into an ocean...
Anyway, if you'd like, we can talk more about this. Shoot me an email at peter.d.sherman@gmail.com, and let's chat!
Oh, and here's a great song, by the way:
Billy Joel - In The Middle Of The Night (The River of Dreams) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9HFYNITCSs
OK, NOW the HN Community -- can tar (-xvf) and feather me! :-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I speak 3 languages on Dvorak-alt-intl layout which I have optimized for coding: https://blog.yourlabs.org/posts/2017-12-22-dvorak-intl-code-... Dvorak fixed my RSI problems, it is not possible that Qwerty have the same physical impact than Dvorak because physically a Qwerty typer has to "walk" a lot more distance with their fingers to type the same thing than a Dvorak typer that has all voyels on the home row. You c…
> " I can still touch type with Qwerty, but my hands hurt after 5 minutes. " That's not a good metric. In your case, you might be right, but for the general public it's like when picking up any new exercise or sport, like running or biking or anything really, when untrained you end up for the first few days with sore ligaments, joints and muscles. You get used to it. My hands never hurt, even though I love writing lo…
I'm a long time Vim user, myself (and no, not looking to spark a holy war here). One observation I have about my own habits is that I subconsciously slap the ESC key every time I'm done with something, even if I'm in a non-modal editor like Notepad or SQL Management studio. It's just become so ingrained in me that I can't stop doing it. Mostly because there's no negative feedback loop associated with doing it.
Learn braille. It's hard, resources are scarce, lots of people don't do it any more. This is why, with practice you can read braille off a computer braille display about as fast as sighted people read text. No screen reader can ever be intelligible that fast. Braille is also a much better way to read code syntax.
Thank you OP for asking and thank all of you helpful HN folks for sharing.
This was at a very large corporation, and he had been blind throughout his long career there. I believe the primary tools he used were JAWS and a device that would actually generate braille for text on screen. This was pretty incredible to me, as he would do most of his reading via this braille device.
I don't think you will be limited to a certain portion of the stack. In some ways, it may open up certain opportunities like working more on the Accessbility features for front-ends, which is a critical part of a front-end but often overlooked.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similar experience for when I taught myself the Dvorak layout years ago. My fingers learned the common motion for whole words first. Actually, I'm not sure I could draw the layout of the qwerty keyboard I'm typing on right now from memory either.
I never understood why Dvorak is a thing. I and others like me can touch type with Qwerty just fine. I can comfortably do 70-90 wpm, which is above my speed of thought. I don't suffer from RSI either and I've been touch typing for 20 years. Also the Qwerty layout is more international. In non-English languages the Dvorak assumptions break down, the layout being optimized for English. And good luck finding Dvorak vers…
I definitely recommend Neo2 for German users. Ctrl + a,x,v and c still with the left hand. Letter frequency optimised for German first, English second. All programming symbols easy accessible, additional layers for Greek symbols and math notation. Also, users of non-US layouts have much more to "gain" by switching from query-like layouts: Due to umlauts or accents, brackets tend to be way harder to reach.