Beating paralysis: 3D printing a one handed keyboard with Bobbi Towers

Today we are catching up with Bobbi Towers, the self-proclaimed "Child of Exercism", who began their journey of contributing to open-source software right here with us. They joined the community in 2018 as a student on the Clojure track and went on to become a mentor. When the pandemic fell upon us and we began work on v3, the track needed a maintainer so they stepped up to develop the tooling and write the initial exercises, despite never having worked on a software project of that scale before.

Our spirited discussion revolved around a common theme of personal growth in the face of life's many challenges such as mental health issues, social isolation, and physical disabilities. After a 2015 accident which resulted in losing the use of a hand, they began to explore alternative input devices to find something more accessible and hopefully become more productive. Finding the existing commercial solutions to be either lacking or prohibitively expensive, they turned to 3D printing to design and manufacture their own one-handed keyboard.