CP with a PC
As I say on my about me page, I have a condition made famous by our good friend Josh Blue, cerebral palsy. So, I am going to talk about my career in computer science with a disability. In short, it has only been made more fun than most things.
I worked for a DevOps team of a media company that had in-house filming of shows for a while. Let me tell you, that was fun. One of my favorite activities was to fake falling down while these shows were filming to force the cast to control, not freaking out while one of their colleagues could have seriously hurt themselves. Not my proudest moment, but definitely the most fun. The DevOps team and I laughed in our regular standup about it. The truth is I never actually fell, nor did I fake it, but it was always the joke that I should. Good times!
In fact, at that same company, I came up with the idea for a universal deployment engine, but more on that later.
I think one of the most obvious, best things about a career in software (with a disability) is that there is no actual limiting, physical requirement short of using a keyboard and trackpad. Yes, I prefer a trackpad for the gestures. With software tooling like Dragon Naturally Speaking, I can produce content at a rate not previously possible. The only thing that it does not do is write code. And for code, I prefer the keyboard anyway. Writing code without a trackpad, as one could imagine, does not make sense. The most significant limitation that I have is typing speed since I type with only one hand. However, since the majority of the content I type is code, typing speed is less critical. The most valuable asset here is how the problem gets solved. This is all brain power and requires nothing but thinking, and fortunately, a “physical disability” does not stop me there.
From my experience, I have largely not seen a problem in my career due to my disability. The only drawback is mouse selection. I have cerebral palsy in my right hand, and 99% of the mouse options are only right-handed. Take, for example, the Logitech MX Master. I have even attempted to contact the company and request that they create a left-handed version. Unfortunately, they responded with, “We have no response plan to do that.” So, in the end, it’s totally fine. The Apple trackpad serves my purposes and provides everything I need, but I can’t pretend that I am not a little disappointed.
One of the more noteworthy things that has happened to me in my career regarding my disability is that I started as a Systems Administrator, racking servers and provisioning ESXi Servers. This was a significant bit of labor that I seriously did not want to do. They were heavy, and my back was always sore. There was just no good sense to do it. Then, I got AWS certified and learned that I could provision servers through python and terraform via my keyboard. My biggest threat and problem now is living a stagnant lifestyle.
A lot happened between racking servers and getting AWS certified, but that’s a different story. The basis for this article is how I manage my career of being a software engineer with Cerebral palsy, and to be honest since the cloud introduced APIs to system administration, nothing is stopping me.