The Life of a Completely Blind Programmer in the Netherlands
I’ve started officially managing a team at Booking.com since the February of last year. Since that time, I’ve started reading a lot of books to learn all the skills that I’m lacking. Recently, I started thinking of reviewing books that I read and my management journey in my blog, and here is the first post in that direction. Today, I was reading Lara Hogan’s Resilient Management , which was…
I recently read the book called Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solution , and I realized something alarming: if you have a perfect life, being an expat automatically leads to a few causes of depression laid out in this book. In this article, I try to demonstrate this through the story of how I moved to the Netherlands in September of 2016, my…
Note: I gave a talk about this topic in the Go 1.8 Release Party in Amsterdam . You can listen to the recording of the presentation (courtesy of my wife), get the slides, or just keep reading this article. As you might already know, I’m completely blind, and I do back-end programming for a living. And, I’ve seen some pretty bad code in my life. Probably, so have you. We all know that the majority…
I’m trying to relocate as a completely blind back-end programmer, and I’ve been interviewed by some European companies in the last two months. I’ve failed at almost all of them except two, and my reason for writing this post isn’t to rant. It’s just to share my point of view so that we can all discuss the pros and cons of the interview process, and how its automation is affecting us – the…
As an Iranian, I am quite used to censorship. In fact, I browse the Internet while constantly switching IPs: I switch to a Canadian IP while paying for services, I switch to a US IP while buying books, and I switch to a UK IP when I am browsing the Internet. This gets me through most of the censorship and blocks. Amazon doesn’t want me to be able to read Kindle books. PayPal doesn’t want me to pay…
You might have never heard about cognitive tunneling. However, chances are, you have sometimes been a victim of it without knowing it. To explain the phenomenon, let me tell you the story that inspireed this post first and let you see it and its results in action. A friend of mine used to work at a start-up where they were working on a website to sell cars online. In Iran, a website like that…
Don’t dread death or pain; dread the fear of death or pain. We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them. – Epictetus: The Art of Living Initially, when my posts started getting popular on Reddit and Hacker News, I saw a few comments that surprised me. A lot of people were telling me, through both the comments and the contact form, about their fear…
When I posted the Autobiography of a Blind Programmer , I received a lot of requests asking about the way I use the computer, how I write code, and how I understand abstract concepts. Last week, I originally started out writing this post. However, I found my writing getting sidetracked all the time. I would point out things from my past that were not about the tools at all. I gave my personal…
This post has been translated to Chinese by LaBaZhou . You may read it here . A question I get asked a lot is, being completely blind, how do I program? I have provided an answer to this question in some places. For example, I have answered How does a visually impaired computer programmer program? on Quora. I have also talked about this in part one and part two of my interview on LiveCoding.tv.…
It doesn’t happen often, but some weekends (like this one) I begin talking to my friends, to catch up with them and see what they’re doing. It has become a habit for me to lose myself in talking to my girlfriend and reading books. Talking to the friends around me is pointless. Most of the time. However, sometimes sparks just ignite from the most pointless questions or discussions, and the idea for…