Hi! I'm Sascha (they/she), a coder, accessibility champion, and cat lover based in Melbourne. Blind since birth and innately curious, I've never been satisfied to take no for an answer, or to let a black box be a black box. Having been reliant on assistive technology from a young age, it was only natural that my curiosity led me to teach myself to code, and later earn a Bachelor of Computer Science from Monash University. It also explains my belief in the importance of reliability and performance: you develop strong opinions about quality pretty quickly when software mediates your access to the world.
For the past three years, I've been putting my skills to use at NV Access, the team behind NVDA, the free and open-source screen reader used by hundreds of thousands of Windows users worldwide. It's the kind of work that keeps you honest: write bad code, and someone can't do their job, chat with friends, or order their groceries. Write good code, and someone gets a little more independence. Not to mention, as my daily driver, it behoves me not to make NVDA worse.
I have a fairly broad technical toolkit: my day-to-day work is currently in Python, with a smattering of C++. For personal projects, my current favourite is Rust, followed by Go. I'm also proficient with the full JavaScript/TypeScript/HTML/CSS stack, and have experience working in Java, Kotlin, Swift and Haskell. I'm comfortable across both Windows and Linux (Debian and friends), and at home doing low-level systems work or developing user-facing interfaces. The through-line here isn't any particular language, but rather choosing the right tool for the job, and a commitment to building things that are robust, thoughtful and usable.
I've also honed my communication and organisational chops through volunteer secretarial work for my former blind cricket club and university linguistics society.
What I'm looking for next is work with purpose: teams building hardware or software with a genuine ethical mission, organisations that take equity, diversity and inclusion seriously, and colleagues who are, quite frankly, nerds about what they do. I care about using technology to empower people who are too often left out of the conversation, and I want to do that work somewhere that cares about it too.
When I'm not at a keyboard, I love to read science fiction, fantasy and history, or work my way through an ever-growing list of music and podcasts. You will usually find me enjoying the company of my cats.