Copilot as Life-Changer for Disabled Developers: Call for Interest & Collaboration

[Jim-Salmons]

OMGaia, Twitter:@natfriedman & the Twitter:@github #Copilot Dev Team,

Thank you SO MUCH for including me in this week's incoming cohort of Preview users. While I know the selection process was simply a numbers game where mine came up, I cannot tell you folks how thrilled I was to get the welcoming on-boarding email to join the Preview community.

You see, I am a man on a mission. More specifically, I am a #DisabledDeveloper #CitizenScientist on a mission to do whatever I can to ensure that the benefits of breakthrough #MachineLearning technologies achieve the potential life-changing impacts that I believe are possible for folks like me.

At 70 years of age, I am on the downslope of my flight on the travels of Spaceship Earth. But I am far from throwing in the proverbial towel as presciently recommended in the Guide by Douglas Adams.

Nine years ago I was fortunate enough to miraculously survive a horrific battle with cancer. While that travail cut short my working career, it put me on a road less traveled that led to my reinvention as an independent, unaffiliated Citizen Scientist in the domain of Digital Humanities. The focus of my research is in the development of a Ground Truth Storage format to facilitate text- and data-mining of digitized serial publications, more precisely, for print era magazines and newspapers. And had everything gone according to plan, I was making decent steady progress in that regard.

Then in July of 2020, everything came to a crashing halt when a fall at home led to my suffering a severe spinal cord injury which very nearly ended my life. Seven days in ICU, two months inpatient therapy, followed by a year plus of at-home rehab and I am making slow but steady progress getting back to work on my research and reconnecting with my research community colleagues. My ability to restart my research activities is due in large part to the amazing accessibility/assistive features built into today's computer operating systems and communication devices.

With serious limitations in the use of my hands, writing code is by far the most challenging post-accident requirement for me to return to pursuit of my research development. Coding assistance is one of the most exciting aspects of the application of #AI/#ML technologies that will positively impact the quality of life for folks like me whose minds are willing but our bodies are not.

I know that this self-introductory post is TL;DR, but it is my sincere effort to start a conversation that may result in development of a sub-community of Copilot developers and users interested in the use of this technology to positively impact the lives of disabled developers and the Citizen Science, Digital Humanities, and Open Source projects we aspire to contribute to.

For my part, I know I can bring leadership members of the @SciStarter and @TimeMachineEU programs to the table to explore kick-starting a pilot project to support the exploration of Copilot as an enabler for disabled developers to participate in Citizen Science, Digital Humanities, and Open Source projects. I am also fairly confident that with this core group of interested parties that we can bring in organizational interest from the Library of Congress' @LC_Labs, British Library's @BL_Labs, FAU's Pattern Recognition Lab, Salford's @PrimaLab, the @Transkribus consortium, and other organizations to support and participate in this agenda.

If you individually or organizationally are a Kindred Spirit to this idea and want to be involved or supportive of seeing Copilot help change the lives of disabled developers, please reach out in reply to this post or via DM so we might work together to make it happen.

Regardless of whether this idea goes any further than this initial post, I thank GitHub and the Copilot developers for doing what you are doing to create what will surely be the means to enhance and extend the abilities of all developer/coders regardless of their physical or knowledge challenges. I know Copilot is going to be a BIG help to me starting this week and going forward to a brighter day ahead.

Happy Healthy Vibes from Colorado,
Jim Salmons

[ryanjsalva]

Hi, Jim. My name is Ryan and I'm VP of Product for GitHub. Among other things, my team supports GitHub Copilot.

First, thank you so much for sharing your story. I've shared it with both co-workers and customers in the last two days surrounding GitHub Universe. When we first started experimenting with GitHub Copilot, we hoped for all sorts of incredible outcomes – that it would increase creativity, make coding more enjoyable, save time, introduce coding to more people, etc. Your story has expanded my imagination in ways I never thought possible.

Second, I'm thrilled to hear of your work – both researching storage formats and expanding the coding community. I'd love to hear your feedback about what's both working and not working with Copilot. If you're up for it, maybe we could even do a pair-programming session together? From there, I'd also be interested in expanding the list of Copilot users through one of the organizations mentioned in your post above.

Let's build something together 😊

[Jim-Salmons]

Hey Ryan @ryanjsalva,

Thank you for your encouraging reply. While there are many threads percolating to weave together for a potential collaboration between GitHub, SciStarter, and the Time Machine Project/Organization etc., two ideas stand out for immediate comment.

First, you triggered fond memories for me at your suggestion that we find an opportunity to do a pair programming session to help speed up my skills and appreciation for the capabilities of Copilot. The bulk of my career was spent as a Smalltalk developer in the early days of the OOP revolution where I met and worked with brilliant folks including Kent Beck, Ward Cunningham, Ralph Johnson, Sam Adams and others. Many of today's best practices in agile methods and software patterns, including pair programming, were nurtured as daily routines in those days in the Smalltalk community.

I look forward to doing a pairs session with you soon. At the moment, I am focused on transitioning my development platform from my trusty Windows box to a new M1 iMac gifted to me by dear friends in support of my Digital Humanities research. Once I am confident that I have my development platform comfortably in place, it would be great to schedule a pair session with you.

The second focus of my gelling thoughts about a Copilot for Disabled Developers support program was directly impacted by my memories related to pair programming. In the early days pre-Internet and broadband communication, the only practical way to pair was face-to-face sitting together at a single machine. With today's incredible digital communication backbone and fast machines, remote pairing a natural choice for the proposed Copilot for Disabled Developers program. With that in mind, I pulled together two four-quadrant model diagrams to explore the design of this proposed program.

The axes for these models are the degree of disability/ability and novice/expertise of the proposed members of the pair. Taking these dimensions into account, you can see that three of the four primary pair compositions make sense for inclusion in the program design. Diagram one identifies the High-Performance Pair consisting of Expert level disabled and able-bodied developers. The other pairing on this first diagram--two novice developers of differing physical abilities--would not be doing the pair or the projects they work on any good and should be avoided.

On diagram two we see the two pair compositions that can be characterized as Mentor Pairs. In these pairs, expertise and disability are cross-matched to provide a benefit to the team members and the projects they contribute to. Expert disabled developers benefit from the energy and capabilities of their learning-partner, and disabled-learners are nurtured by able-bodied experts who find inspiration and fulfillment in helping a challenged developer to increase their knowledge and contribution to the pair's associated projects.

Assuming that this initial program would be done as a measured and evaluated research study, I think that a participation goal should strive to observe the 80/20 Rule with 20% of the pairs as High-Performance teams, and 40% in each of the Mentor Pair compositions.

I welcome your and other community members' feedback and suggestions along these lines.

Happy Healthy Vibes from Colorado,
Jim

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