Since 2017, my colleagues and I have devoted ourselves to exploring and developing microcontrollers, radio communications, Python, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Along the way, we have encountered many different technologies and done many different things. For me, it has always been a long and fascinating journey of exploration.
At first, perhaps what attracted me was simply technology itself.
I enjoy finding out how things actually work, and I enjoy turning an idea into something that can truly run. From code to electronic devices, from a small program to a complete system, I still find joy in the process of creating something out of nothing.
But over time, I gradually realized that technology is not only about technology itself.
Around 2022, my colleagues and I began exploring accessibility. Every developer comes to accessibility for a different reason, but I think we probably share something in common: we hope that what we do can help someone.
Accessibility is not far away from us. In fact, it is present in all aspects of our everyday lives.
I still often think back to the first time I read the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines published by the W3C, and to the profound sense of wonder I felt then. I seemed to be able to feel the love and carebehind those words, flowing toward me from between the lines like a tide.
I do not know what was in the minds of the people who wrote those words at the time. But I imagine that, in their own way, they too hoped that what they had done would one day be seen and used by someone, and ultimately help another person.
And so we carried that feeling with us as we continued our work.
Later, I gradually came into contact with free software, open knowledge, and digital preservation. I began to realize that, although these things may seem quite different, there might be something they share.
The things we are able to learn, use, and create today did not come from nowhere.
We come from society, and we depend on the knowledge, infrastructure, and labor accumulated by countless people. To a great extent, we are able to stand where we are today because countless strangers worked before us and left what they created for those who came after them.
And so I began to wonder: what, then, can we leave behind?
I have not found a final answer.
But at least, for a developer, software and technology are ways in which I can try to answer that question.
So I began trying to create things.
Sometimes it is software. Sometimes it is a tool. Sometimes it is an electronic device. And sometimes it is simply a matter of organizing, preserving, and recording things that might otherwise have been forgotten. I have also begun to care more about questions beyond technology itself: how we create tools, how we use them, and how the things we create today can remain understandable, usable, and improvable for those who come after us.
These things have eventually come together in LibYuba and in the other projects I am working on and creating.
I still do not know where these explorations will ultimately take me.
And I will continue to change my mind. What I consider important today may not remain so in the future; questions that have no answers today may perhaps still have no answers many years from now.
But I think I will keep going.
Just as those who once helped me did, I hope to pass on some of what I have received from this world to those who come after me.
Perhaps that is what I can do, for now.
— YubaC