I tried AoC out one year with the Wolfram language, which sounds insane now, but back then it was just a "seemed like the thing to do at the time" and I'm glad I did it.

Fortunately, the post inspector helps you suss out what's missing in some cases, but c'mon, man, how much effort should I spend helping a social media site figure out how to render a preview? Once you get it right, and to quote my 13 year old: "We have arrived, father... but at what cost?"

https://paulgraham.com/index.html

on *:JOIN:%jt.triv.chan:{ .notice $nick Welcome $nick! }

Loads of fun, though, and IRC was nice venue back then to build a community out of strangers who had similar blocks of free time.

I wrote a Spirograph clone that worked on an iPhone as a Christmas present for my 6 year old, mainly because back then I couldn't find any existing clones where you could drag the gears around to draw, and I thought it would be a fun coding exercise.

It got me over the line in a job interview at the first startup I worked for. Spirographs and toy web apps had nothing to do with the job, but it was a quick way to demonstrate "chops" to the engineering team, in what was otherwise a disaster of an all-day interview.

I was sick, and tried to reschedule the interview, but the company had planned their whole day around me being there, and the CEO was going to travel for vacation afterwards. I put on a brave face and talked with the CEO, then the tech founders, but I was becoming more and more listless as the day went on.

The engineering team took me out for lunch and beers. We sat outside, and I was facing the sun, feeling like hell, and after the first beer I was in no way able to think technically. Rather than invert a binary tree, or whatever they were asking me about, I shifted the conversation to kids and apps, and passed my phone around for them to all play with the Pufftygraph controls and draw some hypotrochoids.

Some combination of sympathy for someone obviously dead on their feet but still trying, and the app, was enough to get my foot in the door. I had a good time there, but if I had it to do over again, I would have just cancelled since they were so inflexible. Now in the post-covid world, the idea of inviting someone sick to breathe all over your team for a day sounds insane.

[1] https://cautery.blogspot.com/2012/12/pufftygraph-html5-spiro...

I remember how happy he was with the iPhone. He said it was the first device he was able to use without special accessibility software, and that was in 2007, I imagine the experience is better today.

I’m sure you’re (OP) already on the ball with ways to help him, but if you haven’t looked into movies with described audio, apparently it makes a whale of a difference.

I was in tech support when winmodems first hit the scene. The best I could do for my users then was to configure their init strings to use "buffered async" mode (&Q6 on an RPI modem, I forget what it was for the Sportster winmodems) instead of error correction.

Unrelated, poor Shawn. I wish I could have jumped on a 10 minute phone call with him back then to troubleshoot his external modem before he started spamming the forum and got himself banned.

Anyway, I’m 52 and have been typing daily at tech jobs since 1995. I had a run-in with RSI around 2000, and tried ergonomic aids like a squishy pad in front of my keyboard to rest my wrists on, this sliding thing that I rested my elbows on. None of it made a lick of difference.

I changed the way I typed. I made sure to keep my hands and wrists relaxed, and swapped out stretching my fingers for keys with sliding my arms around… and it worked.

I still type a lot every day, and I’ve been pain free for 20 years. YMMV, obviously, but changing how you use your arms and hands might be a huge boon.

I imagine that date is in a lot of Russian passwords. That was the day of the '91 coup attempt against Gorbachev.