<p>Hi all!</p>
<p>My name is Parham Doustdar. I am a completely blind programmer from Iran. If you're curious about how I program at all, you can check out an interview with me on <a href="https://www.livecoding.tv/parham90/">LiveCoding.tv</a>, or if you're more into text, you can check out my answer on Quora to <a href="http://qr.ae/RgxgtX">How does a visually impaired computer programmer do programming?</a></p>
<p>I would love to become a more active community member, but there is a problem, and I'd love to know more if any of you have been able to successfully tackle it, and how you've done it.</p>
<p>As I said before, I live in Iran. This means:</p>
<ol>
<li>There are no Go conferences here. In fact, there are not many programmer conferences here.</li>
<li>Only a couple of companies use Go, and they are not looking for employees.</li>
</ol>
<p>My goal is to get a job using Go (I have programmed in PHP for five years now), blog about Go and speak about Go. However, they require that I write a lot of Go every day. As long as I can't get a job writing Go, it seems like I can't be an active community member, because the chances are high that I'd just speak rubbish.</p>
<p>Have any of you had this problem? What have you done to address it? Have you been successful?</p>
<hr/>**评论：**<br/><br/>aaaqqq: <pre><blockquote>
<p>because the chances are high that I'd just speak rubbish</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I highly doubt that. You seem to know what you're doing and know what you want. That's a good start. </p>
<p>As for your Go experience & being part of the community, you can always start contributing on any open source Go project. <a href="https://github.com/trending/go">https://github.com/trending/go</a> could be a good place to start.</p></pre>mekanikal_keyboard: <pre><p>if you write Go for any purpose, you are a Go programmer</p></pre>matryer: <pre><p>Don't be afraid of asking stupid questions or getting things wrong. The Go community is mostly extremely supportive and they'll help you when you make mistakes, rather than shaming.</p></pre>parham90: <pre><p>Thanks a lot, everyone!</p>
<p>I'll look more into contributing to a project. I personally don't have an idea for a project right now, so I guess I'll just stick with providing code wherever my limited knowledge allows!</p>
<p>Thanks!</p></pre>thewhitetulip: <pre><p>Well, I recently switched to Go from Python and even I don't have much people using Go around me. The best way to start is to either contribute to existing projects or start developing projects on your own, I built a todo list manager <a href="http://github.com/thewhitetulip/Tasks" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/thewhitetulip/Tasks</a> few months ago, for three days it was trending on github :-)</p>
<p>I am not a webdev God, I am still learning Go, yet while developing Tasks, I learned a lot of things.</p></pre>dasacc22: <pre><p>I've always considered picking a project to work on and finish when learning something to be one of the more difficult tasks. Getting a job removes that obstacle for sure, though you're not guaranteed to enjoy the work.</p>
<p>If you're having trouble picking something to work on, you may also want to look into various programming contests. Generally, they outline functionality you need to implement and will have some form of community surrounding it to discuss various solutions.</p>
<p>Otherwise, writing software to improve some other aspect of your life probably has a high chance for either being completed or leading to a better idea and starting anew since you'll be emotionally invested. For example, you mention being blind, is there anything you ever wished the computer did for you in this area more? Or, do you have a hobby that requires some menial task to be done by hand? Could you improve it with software?</p>
<p>Over the course of any of this work, you'll likely find yourself reporting bugs to libraries you're using and maybe even submitting patches just to get your program to do what you want. I've done this for over 10 years without ever attending a single conference. This year though, it looks like I'll be attending my first conference.</p></pre>parham90: <pre><p>I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment on picking a project and doing it to learn something being more difficult. I think the difficulty comes from the fact that you have spent all your time at work solving problems, and by the time you're home, you are tired and probably suffering from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue" rel="nofollow">decision fatigue</a>.</p>
<p>I was thinking of implementing the back-end of something fun, such as a game (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgDRmXguWzQ" rel="nofollow">Goblin's Breakfast</a> anyone?). However, I'm not sure if there would be any point in sharing it on Github?</p></pre>dasacc22: <pre><p>As one my github repo's description reads, "just a four hour project to help me out when exploring the fret board, maybe this time I wont lose the source". Archiving is as good a reason as any.</p>
<p>But also you can't anticipate what will ever happen, so just publish it. For example, a few years back a friend invited me to come play pen and paper dungeons and dragons. I didn't have dice to roll a character using the rules he likes so I wrote an android app in a few hours that does the weird stuff he normally does by hand and published it on the play store just so he could inspect it and see what I was using.</p>
<p><a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dasa.diceroller" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dasa.diceroller</a></p>
<p>Today, there's 61,000 active installs and an average 4.1 star rating and I regularly get emails from people thanking me for a sane dice rolling app. Who knew?</p></pre>
