One of my strongest childhood memories is of the attic of my old house, where my family stored old scientific books. I would climb out onto the roof to read them. For my ninth birthday, I asked for a set of encyclopedias about math, physics, chemistry, and biology. I was always curious, always seeking answers.
Much of my curiosity stemmed from realizing early in life that I was different from others. I was born with cerebral palsy, which always made it hard for me to do things that I could see others do with relative ease. I couldn't walk until I was six. I encountered discrimination and inequality at a young age and began searching for the reasons behind this mistreatment. Simple answers like "bad people behave that way" didn't satisfy me. The lack of information about the experiences and lives of other people with disabilities was always frustrating to me. I had a hard time reconciling my own abilities with negative stereotypes about disabled people.
Computing gave me an outlet to explore my curiosity and creativity. When I was 14, I received an old laptop. The hard drive died after around two months, so the only thing it could do was boot into MS-DOS from a floppy disk. I wanted to keep using it to play computer games, but to do that, I would have to learn to program my own games. Fortunately, I found a book on QBasic in the school library, so I started teaching myself. I had no idea that programming could be a career, or even much sense of the other benefits it could bring. At the time it was just another way to solve a problem I faced.
After about two months I created a simple racing game. The hardest part wasn't the code, but typing. It's physically painful for me to type. It's also slow going. To type parentheses or brackets, I have to hold down shift with my nose.
If you try working the way I had to, you'll quickly see how hard it is. Even for QBasic, I started to come up with basic techniques on my own to simplify the development process. Later, I discovered that the effort put into code structuring, OOP, and writing unit tests truly pays off. My disability heightened my perception of code, and many best practices make perfect physical sense to me, rather than being mere pieces of advice. Basically, my love for clean code started thanks to my disability.
Check out the video below—the latest in GitHub’s Coding Accessibility video series—and keep reading to learn how Anton not only uses AI as an assistive technology, but how he's expanding his efforts to build AI-powered assistive technologies himself.
Audio descriptive version also available.
Building independence
Eventually, I acquired a better computer. Around 2007, I showed a school teacher some of my programs, which I thought were pretty simple. But they told me that my code was too advanced for the classes they taught at my school. So I'm mostly self-taught, though I did take some courses in university, where I studied systems administration.
My first relationship began while I was in university, but ended because I was too concerned about my disability. The breakup had a huge impact on me. I decided to better myself and become more independent. I began working out at the gym. It turned out that the most athletic member of my family was my grandmother. We went to the gym together for around 12 years. I have also tried yoga, wushu, and even a few basic workouts from boxing. Sports have given me many insights and helped shape my personality. I'm not attending the gym much right now, but it taught me a lot about life.
I have a lot of people in my life that are willing to help me and I receive some support from the government, but I don't want to rely solely on that. I don't want to just take, I don't want to be dependent. In my situation, this may seem normal and acceptable, but I have chosen a different path.
I started freelancing in 2012 after a house fire destroyed part of our home. I always inform my clients about my disability. I present it as an advantage because it provides me with extensive experience in solving complex and unconventional problems. I won’t give up when faced with difficulties in my work—I don't know how to give up. I can literally delve into a problem for days and nights, reading articles, and searching for any possible ways to at least partially solve it.
In the early days, many of my clients were students who had no money to pay me, but I did the work to gain experience. I learned JavaScript, C++, and any other languages that my clients requested. I wrote small games, solved simple problems like implementing matrix classes, developed game bots, and anything else that seemed interesting. Sometimes, I had to deobfuscate and reverse engineer JavaScript or even binaries. I worked with DirectX and even injected my code into processes.